The annual Pallium Lecture held Sept. 4 drew nearly 1,200 people to hear Bishop Daniel E. Flores of the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas, speak on the Council of Nicaea. (Photo by John Bruns)
Shepherds matter. Words matter. In the economy of salvation, there is very little that does not matter.
This overall theme underscored the 2025 Archdiocese of Milwaukee Pallium Lecture, “Synods, Councils and Creeds — Treasuring Our Catholic Inheritance Today.”
Close to 1,200 people attended the lecture held Sept. 4 at the Brookfield Conference Center, according to organizers. Bishop Daniel E. Flores of the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas, gave the keynote address.
The program also included remarks from Archbishop Jeffrey S. Grob, who noted that “the beauty in particular of this evening is the realization that … our Catholic faith is not a static museum piece.”
“Rather, it’s a dynamic reality,” said Archbishop Grob. “Ours is a living tradition.”
The Pallium Lecture has been held annually since 2003, and this year served as the opening event of a major conference, “The Legacies of Nicaea I and Vatican II: An Inheritance Unfolding,” held at Marquette University in Milwaukee over the ensuing weekend.
Before Bishop Flores’ remarks, Lydia LoCoco, past director of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee’s Office of Evangelization and Catechesis, took to the conference center stage to educate the audience on what, exactly, a pallium is.
A pallium is the Y-shaped vestment worn over the chasuble of an archbishop when he celebrates Mass. It is handcrafted by nuns from lambswool, an elaborate and labor-intensive process heavy with symbolism.
“All of this means, in the life of the church, our shepherds matter,” LoCoco said.
It was a fitting prelude to the remarks of Bishop Flores, whose address focused on the process by which the fathers of the ecumenical Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople “chiseled” language into an understanding of God’s Trinitarian nature.
That process, too, was laborious and elaborate — but its fruits endure 1,700 years later and continue to inform the faith of Catholics who recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday.
“Folks, if we don’t get this, we might as well all pack up and go home. This is the faith,” said Bishop Flores, referring to the Trinity and the precise manner in which we understand (and the equally precise manner in which we cannot fully understand) the relationship between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
Controversy over the theology involved in the nuances of this relationship gave rise to the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople themselves, Bishop Flores explained.
He opened by giving a brief but illuminating history of the Arian heresy, which erupted in the early 4th century. This heresy held the belief that Jesus Christ, God the Son, was not equal in divinity to God the Father and Creator.
“The structure of human thought sort of creaks when looking for ways to describe the identity and the works of God, revealed in Christ and testified to in Scripture,” Bishop Flores said. “Arius and his later defenders were not unintelligent, but they could not see a way or find the words to preserve the teaching about one God, Creator of heaven and earth, while at the same time speaking of the eternal Son — who is not the Father — within the Godhead.”
Arius and his followers were at odds with many of their local bishops. To some, the difference in their beliefs might seem like a splitting of theological hairs.
But nothing could have been more important then, and nothing remains more important today, said Bishop Flores.
“The communion within the Catholic Church is inseparably a matter of communion of the faith — professed in the local churches — in the Christ,” said Bishop Flores. “Faith in who Christ is, faith in what he does for us, and how we relate through him to one another, to the Father … the Christological faith of the Church is embedded and expressed in the life and communion of the local churches, like the local Church of Milwaukee.”
The words used to express that faith and maintain that communion matter, said Bishop Flores: “That’s why Nicaea fought for the words.”
The Council of Nicaea clarified that “the Only-Begotten (Jesus Christ) is of the same God-reality as God the Father,” said Bishop Flores.
The creed produced at Nicaea was revisited and refined by the Council of Constantinople 56 years later, where council fathers were likewise taken up by controversies surrounding the nature of the Holy Spirit.
Ultimately, they would affirm “that the Trinity acts as one with respect to Creation,” said Bishop Flores. “The Father creates, the Son creates, the Spirit creates. There is one Creator.”
The legacy of these ancient councils informs and animates our Catholic faith today, Bishop Flores said, by giving us a means to understand the “self-donating fullness” of the Trinity.
“The Father pours himself out into the Son without losing the fullness of himself. And the Son, by the Spirit, pours himself back to the Father without losing his fullness as Son,” he explained. “And the Spirit, in ways even more mysterious, is agent and recipient of the self-donating fullness — that is, the reciprocal self-donation of the Father and the Son.”
This is more than a creed, after all: It is a model for a faith lived out.
“In the Trinity, not one possesses what is not also ecstatically given away,” said Bishop Flores. “(And) the self-donation that is the Trinitarian life is given to us not for ourselves to possess, but for the sake of our giving it to others.”
A full version of the text as Bishop Flores wrote it, including all cited sources, can be viewed by scrolling down at wordsandthings.org.
