Last week’s Thomas More Centre newsletter was an engaging piece by Mark Makowiecki, our Queensland organiser. In it Mark reports and reflects upon a talk given in Brisbane for the TMC in early November by writer and Chesterton Society Secretary, Gary Furnell.

Gary’s talk touched upon the transcendent and subterranean sources of “human creativity” by exploring the thought of two important 20th-century thinkers – the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1972) and the Austrian Jewish psychiatrist and Shoah survivor, Viktor Frankl (1905-1978).

The article (and talk) remind us that there is nothing glib or automatic about true creativity. One cannot simply summon up “a creative minority” in a display of organisational spell-casting or in bureaucratic spiel.

Authentic creativity, though seemingly mysterious, is not abstract. It is often most evident in retrospect. It is born and nurtured in a concrete and a particular person. It is both a gift and task, a grace and responsibility – terms not readily welcomed by atomised, secularised notions of the self.

As Mark writes with perception: “This (insight of Maritain and Frankl) makes sense because it is, after all, impossible to catch a spark with one’s arms folded and one’s mind closed.”

Secondly, creativity is most sustainable when it is developed within the free and freely given interchange and the solidarity of relationships, living tradition, and community.

It is this personalist and communitarian seed-bed which the founders of the TMC discovered when they first recognised that Australia needed “an educated Christian response” to the challenges of society and culture “which adds solidarity and strength to public action” (Thomas More Centre Newsletter, 1993).

This “educated” and Christian response was found to flourish when those attending TMC events not only gained valuable information, but received lasting personal formation with others who became close friends, collaborators, mentors, and in some cases, future spouses.

Today, the revived TMC paradoxically aims to de-centralise its events, resources and talks, and to amplify the creative possibilities and sustainability of “subsidiarity”. We have begun by founding hubs in urban and regional areas and bringing the leaders of these together regularly to share resources and to coordinate ideas.

“Live” events have an invaluable and restorative role, especially after the isolation and restrictions of the Covid-19 era with existential sprawl of life today. We acknowledge that these in-person encounters can be greatly assisted by a streamlined use of social media and other technologies.

Pope Benedict XVI said to the participants of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in 2008 that subsidiarity and solidarity are the two cross-hairs upon which the human person can be formed and supported. Solidarity, he said, enables “the human family to share fully the treasure of material and spiritual goods” while “subsidiarity is the coordination of society’s activities in a way that supports the internal life of local communities”.

Because it rests upon a Christian response (though open to all genuine seekers of truth), the TMC also humbly acknowledges that whatever founding principles it pursues are implicitly derived from the workings of the Triune God, from which these principles derive in pale and incomplete ways.

To cite Pope Benedict again from the same address in 1993: “When we examine the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity in the light of the Gospel, we realise that they are not simply ‘horizontal’ – they both have an essentially vertical dimension” which “points to the Creator.”

To assist in the discovery of lasting and meaningful friendship, while encouraging “the getting of wisdom” along the path to supernatural life, is clearly a compelling mission for our isolated, confused, and God-forgotten times.

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre