In part I, I examined William Hood’s recent attempt to understand Fra Angelico as a propagandist for the Observant reform in the Dominican Order. In his magisterial treatment of Fra Angelico at San Marco (Yale University Press, 1993) Professor Hood interprets each of the works against the background of its predecessors elsewhere in Dominican or other art, or elsewhere in Angelico’s own corpus. His particular concern is with the institutional tradition out of which Angelico spoke: the spaces, spirituality and devotional practices of the friars, which conditioned the subject matter and significance of the works. He persuasively argues that Angelico’s art is to be understood as an expression of a particular view of Dominican community and tradition. I proposed that Angelico’s art would be better understood if there had also been some examination of the doctrinal tradition out of which the painter preached: in particular its Scriptural and Thomistic Catholicism. Essential are some understanding of Angelico’s aesthetic (its Thomist view of beauty, light, reality, analogy, the senses ...), his understanding of the function of religious art (as worship, visualizing spiritual exercise, source of instruction, tool of preaching), and his theology of the Incarnation and the Passion as the way to the beatific vision for the various audiences to whom he preached. Admittedly very little has been written to date on Angelico’s theology. Hood’s book is a great jumping off point for such an endeavour.

On the Feast of the Epiphany 1443 the high altar of San Marco was consecrated in the presence of the pope and all the cardinals, patriarchs and bishops present at the Council of Florence.

Spirits burdened by the wars or conflicts between peoples and nations have been uplifted in recent months, especially in the Near East. A new peace process between Israel and its neighbours, including direct negotiations with Palestinian leaders, requires consummate statesmanship and also an adjustment in the hearts of all, moving from fear and hatred to hope and generosity. The Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and Israel (December 30, 1993) has implications for Catholics and Jews everywhere. Within this context, the Latin-rite Patriarch of Jerusalem has promulgated a lengthy pastoral letter in November 1993. An English version is published in Origins 23 (January 20, 1994) pp. 541-555. In the context of an interfaith conference held in Jerusalem from February 1-4, 1994 the Patriarch gave an address entitled “Religious Leadership in the Holy Land.” This text will be studied at the end of the essay.

In the pastoral letter Patriarch Michel Sabbah celebrates explicitly the new hope for “peace and reconciliation between our two peoples, Jewish and Palestinian, and with all the Arab world” (#1). The sad events of prolonged conflict “must not consume the past and present.. . “ but now the struggle will be to maintain and build peace with justice (#1). This letter about the Bible intends to encourage reading and understanding of God’s Word, “in order to make it the object of meditation and prayer” (#2).

The poignancy of praying in the Eucharistic liturgy the psalms and readings about Israel and its neighbours has been particularly graphic for Christian communities in the Near East over recent decades.

It is at least twenty years too late to prevent most Catholic institutions of higher education in Europe and North America from establishing departments of religious studies. It is not, of course, too late to disestablish them or, short of that rather impractical possibility, reform them along lines extending from a quite different set of principles. I believe a particularly good reason for doing no less than the latter is that the present enterprise is a contradiction to genuine Catholic education; simply one more manifestation of the stale secularism which now permeates Catholic schools. And the proof of this claim, as I intend to argue, lies in the fact that it is impossible within the regnant discourse of religious studies to reclaim what St Thomas meant by “acts commanded by religion.” The very notion of religion operating within that enterprise precludes it. The “religion” of religious studies is both too extensive in its initial presumptions but, more importantly, much too narrow in its final application to encompass what St. Thomas spoke of when he wrote on religion.

Perhaps the best route, then, to what St Thomas meant by religion, and in particular by acts commanded by religion, is getting straight about what he was not speaking of. To this end we can look to the most recent Encyclopedia of Religion, published under the editorial leadership of Mircea Eliade. The contribution on “religion” by Winston L. King provides just the sort of definition that reflects, not only the current wisdom in the field of religious studies, but a perfect antithesis to the teaching of St. Thomas.