Sebastian Morello at Catholic Man UK

This is a talk from the Catholic men's weekend in Walsingham, November 2021: "To Be A Pilgrim" - Man and the Call to Pilgrimage, given by Dr. Sebastian Morello, formerly a catechist at the Southwark Diocese Centre at Tooting BEC & a formerly supervised for his doctoral thesis by Sir Roger Scruton, widely considered to be one of the world's greatest contemporary intellectuals.

This talk offers some deep insights well worth pondering. Key among them is the observation that we have lost our devotional faith & attempted to replace it with a kind of rationality which seeks to explain & rationalise a supernatural reality we need and long for as part of the truth of our existence.

As someone long involved in catechesis myself I am super guilty of thinking 'if only I can explain this the right way, this person will accept it'. At the same time I have always considered that an intellectual approach is only part of the jigsaw puzzle. We have to have rational answers for the faith which forms such a vital and integral part of our lives (1 Peter 3:15) and yet the lack of that knowledge does not limit anyone's access to that faith in any way whatsoever: quite the opposite.

At the same time, one cannot say that the answer is to remove theology and simply believe in Jesus. Jesus is enough, as Pascal perhaps would agree, but we — or at least someone — has to have the tools to explain how that all works.

It is interesting to hear an intellectual arguing against intellectualism.

Morello laments the fact that the Catholic intellectual tradition is virtually non-existent especially in the UK. On so-called Catholic education, he states "We are patronising the perversion of our own intellects"