Idea
Like every concrete form of life in the Church, a certain idea, an inspiration, underlies the Oratorian vocation. In each generation, this vision needs to be considered afresh by means of returning to the sources in which it is articulated. Returning to the sources, however, is not antiquarianism, undertaken for the purpose of achieving a minute historical reconstruction of the Oratorian past. In returning to the tradition, we seek to receive it not as something past, but as something alive in the present, resourceful in the here and now. What this means is that every reading of our tradition is also a re-reading, an interpretation. Its fidelity consists in allowing the past and the present to illuminate each other, in this way bringing to contemporary light the enduring meaning of the Oratorian vocation.