Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, September 20 2024
On September 20th 2024, the ROR group, in collaboration with the University of Navarra and the Pontifical John Paul II University in Krakow, organised a study day dedicated to the work of Prof. Lucas Francisco Mateo-Seco, held in the Aula minor of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. The theologians Piero Coda (Sophia University), Karen Kilby (Durham University), Gabrielle Thomas (Emory University), Ari Ojell (Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland), Paul O’Callaghan (PUSC, Rome), Robert Wozniak (Pontificial University of John Paul II), Miguel Brugarolas (Universidad de Navarra), Ilaria Vigorelli (PUSC, Rome) and Giulio Maspero (PUSC, Rome) took part in the work.
The depth of the speeches showed how Professor Mateo-Seco’s legacy is not only an academic but also a spiritual one.
Lucas Francisco Mateo-Seco ‘teacher and witness’ or, if you like, ‘witness who succeeded in being a teacher’, developed a theological method, firm in its scientific rigour and anchored on two fundamental pillars: fidelity to tradition and constant openness to the questions of his contemporaries. The study of texts, especially of the Fathers (but not only), led him to a dogmatic synthesis that he exercised in various areas, from Trinitarian theology to Christology, from eschatology to anthropology, but always under the sign of a search for the profound meaning of faith. He saw in the Trinity the source of the new evangelisation. As it was for Karl Rahner, also in the vision of Professor Mateo-Seco the mystery is to be considered always present in everyday life: accepting one’s own limits, on the way to the infinity of God, gives a gratuitous and radical sense of hope to man.
Our very existence is not good because of what it produces or becomes, it is good in itself insofar as it is God-given. The dependence that originates from the relationship with the Triune God is therefore not a cage or limes, in the sense of a fortified frontier or limitation that ‘closes’, but limen, that is, a threshold, a limitation that ‘opens’, that allows passage. We must therefore continue our efforts as theologians and, together with experts in the various sciences, promote a culture that adopts a vision that is far-sighted and shared: in other words, that thinks from the ‘gift’.
