Associate Professor of History Charles Strauss, Ph.D., will deliver “ʻThe Church as Field Hospital’: St. John Neumann, St. Francis Xavier Parish, and Catholic Social Teaching” as the 10th annual William K. Collinge Lecture. The lecture will take place on Monday, June 20, at 7 p.m., at St. Francis Xavier School, 465 Table Rock Road, Gettysburg. Admission is free.
The lecture takes its title from a 2013 statement by Pope Francis: “The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. ... Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. ... And you have to start from the ground up.” Strauss will apply the metaphor of the field hospital to the life and ministry of St. John Neumann, an immigrant from Bohemia, who as bishop of Philadelphia laid the cornerstone of the current St. Francis Church on June 20, 1852, exactly 170 years before the date of the lecture, and returned a year later to dedicate the church. This talk will examine Neumann’s work with the infirm, immigrants, and students as a way to examine the social goals of the Catholic Church in the 19th century.
Besides his work at the Mount, Strauss is president of the St. Francis Xavier School Advisory Board and a board member of the Interfaith Center for Peace and Justice (ICPJ), in Gettysburg.
The Collinge Lecture, an annual event jointly sponsored by ICPJ and the St. Francis Xavier Church Social Welfare and Justice Committee, honors Professor Collinge's father, the late William K. Collinge, who left significant bequests to St. Francis Xavier Church and ICPJ.