Last weekend I attended and performed at the second annual Portsmouth Institute Conference, at Portsmouth Abbey School near Newport, Rhode Island.  It was a tremendous experience.

With over two hundred attendees, I was amazed that this was only the second year that Portsmouth Institute has sponsored such a thing.  The school is a Catholic co-ed boarding high school, run by a group of Benedictines who celebrate the Ordinary Form of the liturgy with Gregorian chant and who all attended the conference and mingled with the guests, much to our delight.

The subject of last year’s conference was “The Catholic William F. Buckley”, and the presentations given then were very entertaining, as you can discover yourself by checking out the inaugural issue of “The Portsmouth Review”, which features the texts of the speeches and photographs from the 2009 conference.

And this year’s conference was on “Newman and the Intellectual Tradition”.

Get this lineup of speakers: Fr. Ian Ker from England, the world’s foremost Newman scholar; Peter Kreeft, the Catholic author and apologist; Deacon Jack Sullivan, whose miraculous healing via Newman’s intercession was the official miracle that led to the upcoming beatification; Fr. George Rutler, EWTN rock-star; Fr. Richard Duffield of Newman’s Oratory in England, who is serving as Actor for Newman’s cause; Patrick Reilley of the Cardinal Newman Society; Edward Short and Paul Griffiths, Newman scholars; opera singers, musicians, and an Anglican boys’ choir performing some of Newman’s works; oh, and me.  You see, even though I’m not qualified to mix with the upper echelons of culture and the intelligentsia, I get a free pass because I’m an actor.  I may not be a Newman expert, but I play one on TV.

I was honored to perform my one-man show as Blessed Dominic Barberi, the Passionist priest who received John Henry Newman into the Church, and the audiences for my two performances were very enthusiastic.

This conference was, as the American Chesterton Society conference always is, a little bit of heaven on earth.  It is what the Church ought to be; it is what the Church really is – a body of people sharing a common faith and the rich intellectual, musical, artistic, and dramatic tradition such a communion of faith produces.

The great thing about the St. Austin Review and what we gripe about and stumble towards at the Inkdesk here is that we are yearning for something that is no chimera, no pipe dream.  The Catholic culture that we seek to revive, the culture that once informed all of the West and that gave us Shakespeare, Dante, cathedrals and hospitals is something real.  And not just real, but alive.  It’s not the common culture of the day, the secular parody of culture that is not really a culture at all, except in the sense that it’s a culture grown in a Petri dish, a culture of bacteria, infection and death; it is a culture of health and life that spreads from the Body of Christ and His members; it is the soil for growth, the agri-culture of our souls, the communion, camaraderie and shared search for truth, beauty and goodness.  It is what keeps us all happy, fed, and Christian.

This is what we had at the Portsmouth Institute last week.  This is what we will have at the Chesterton Conference in Maryland in August.  This is Christian Culture.

And if you needed any more proof – all you had to do at the conference was drink the wine.  The wine, the port, and everything served to the grateful attendees was supreme.  The water of the dreary world was for a weekend turned into the good wine of Cana, and may we all work for such a transformation in the false culture about us and in our own hearts.

For more information on the Portsmouth Institute, go to http://www.portsmouthinstitute.org

For more information on this year’s Chesterton Conference (featuring Joseph Pearce, Fr. Ian Ker, yours truly on stage as Stanford Nutting, and more) go to http://chesterton.org/2010conference.htm

And to find out more about Cardinal Newman and Dominic Barberi, keep an eye on these pages where we’ll announce by fall the release of Theater of the Word’s movie “To Follow the Light – The Conversion of John Henry Newman”, filmed on location in Littlemore, England.