What is an Advocatus?

An Advocatus, an expression used in the Middle Ages, is an advocate, charged with the protection and representation in secular matters of the church.
I am legally-trained as an advocate, in my middle age and serving the church particularly in "secular" or legal matters. That's as far as the similarities go.

From the early years of my legal training, I have been taught to understand and apply what I learnt through the Socratic method of questioning. This has now become like a knee jerk reaction in every aspect of my life. In every situation or anything I face, I ask: "What if...?".

The following aptly sums up the value of questioning is to legal reasoning and learning:

"There is a value to asking questions. We all learn from asking questions either of ourselves or of others. And the answers lead to the next question, on and on. Thus, if the teacher can take the student from question to question, thereby demonstrating the progression of the teacher's own thought (or a judge's thought or a court's thought, or a litigant's thought), the student can begin to visualize what forms the progression of his or her own thought might take. The ability to formulate the question that will best advance the inquiry is the skill that students need to develop to be able to think and learn on their own. Accordingly, the student must be able to see us, their teachers, in the act of formulating the best next question. Where we have figured some things out and reached certain conclusions, the student needs to see what guided our figuring out, how we got from point A to point B. By showing our students the questions that we formulated along the way, we demonstrate how they can reach conclusions of, and on, their own." [Jennifer Jaff, Frame-Shifting: An Empowering Methodology for Teaching and Learning Legal Reasoning, 35 J. Legal Educ. 249, 262 (1986)].

As such, this blog of mine is more like a conversation and at the very least, just asking and talking aloud to myself on what I see, hear, taste, feel and think about things which matter most to me in living this life according to the Word of God.