St. Aelred, March 3, 2008

One of the last of the church fathers, one of the earliest Christian humanists, St. Aelred is the patron saint of the Order of St. Ael;red and St. Aelred Friendship Society.

For me a Christian humanist is one who recognizes the full awesomeness of the humanity of God, God becoming human in Jesus Christ. To say the least, it raised humanity to a dignity that gave it new meaning when the very God of the universe walked this earth as one of us.

St. Aelred gloried in the humanness of Jesus and, in my terms, he told us that being human is a wonderful gift from God, that loving as a human is a wonderful gift from God.

For a bit more biographical data on St. Aelred, I refer you to our page on St. Aelred in our website: http://www.geocities.com/staelredmonasterymanila

For our tribute to St. Aelred today, I offer a quote from the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Vol 4, American Council of Learned Societies.

St. Aelred is known as Christocentric twelfth century monastic humanist. His most famous work, On Spiritual Friendship, which explores the relation between spiritual and human friendship in a monastic context, reveals his own conscious homosexual orientation and gives love between persons of the same gender its most profound expression in Christian theology.

In his writings, St. Aelred shares candidly and honestly his own same-sex feelings of love and friendship.

One of our St. Aelred Seminary students, for a class on St. Aelred, sums it up quite well, “St. Aelred deserves to be the patron saint of gays and lesbians because he was true to himself. He never covered up his sexuality, which was same-sex attracti0n, and he was not pulled fully into the prevailing sex-negative antibody dualistic philosophy of St. Augustine.”