Fr. Gabriel Gillen, O.P.
A Letter from Father Gabriel
“If you live today, you breathe in nihilism… it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” — Flannery O’Connor
In responding to Jesus’ call to be fishers of men, it is a challenge to haul aboard millennials because they have been exposed to a nihilistic culture that convinces them that truth is subjective. Relativism is like a red tide that causes water to become so depleted of oxygen that fish essentially drown.
Young people today are immersed in these dark waters as this harmful tide is streamed into their lives, starving their minds of reason and causing a disregard for the givenness of things—an indifference that leads them to believe that nothing is really of consequence.
This is the ocean in which your children and grandchildren are now forced to swim. Saint Thomas Aquinas helps us to turn back the tide by teaching us that everything is of consequence, for the Son of God became incarnate, suffered, and was swallowed into the belly of the earth to redeem everything!
Because of your generosity, many young people are being saved from this sea of secularism. I hope you enjoy reading in this newsletter about some of the great catches of souls that you make possible, like the busloads of college students the friars bring to the Dominican House of Studies for the March for Life every year, or the women and men brought to repentance, conversion, and healing by Dominican pro- life preaching.
Whether we are serving on college campuses, as Missionaries of Mercy, or in the public square, the Dominican Friars thank you for making it possible for us to promote a culture of life and a return to reason.
Father Gabriel Gillen, O.P.
Executive Director
Dominican Foundation
