Bishop Buddy Scrapbook 1937 (2)

Degrees and Their Implications

CHIMES

Mediocrity and inferiority on the academic levels are unbearable in the name of God and His church. Academic excellence should be the necessary consequence of the life prin- ciple of the Catholic school. That principle is Christ. The graduates from a Catholic college- from this College of Saint Mary' s-are dis- tinguished among all the students of the world in these ways:-They are baptized. They are confirmed. They have passed the entrance examinations of eternity. They have qualified under tests spiritual as well as psychological. Their reactions are more than responses. They are responsibilities. These graduates are invested with the indestructible regalia of the sacraments. They wear the uniforms of the storm troops of Christ. They have lived for these past four years under the same roof with Him. They have taken themselves and their conduct seriously in relation to Him. They have shared His board, have known Him as Food and Drink. They have formed their life on the pattern of perfection. They have lived in the presence of this Model. They have won honors in the Society of the Holy Spirit. They think as Christians. They speak the language of Christianity. They act as Christians. All this is of infinite importance. All this is the most real and pervasive element in their col- lege education. · They have contributed to it the influence of their own example, the force of their own radiant goodness. They share as they enjoy the companionship of a student body in that robust state of health which is sanctifying grace. They are taught and trained by a body of teachers whose minimum preparation is an academic degree, whose major requirements are ascending degrees of holiness, whose graduate fields are those of eminent and con- secrated sanctity. The Catholic college exists for these rea- sons. Her students live not only naturally; they live supernaturally. Being in attendance at class, their lives have academic value; being in the state of grace, they have supernatural JUNE, 1938

value. So their least act1v1ty, their whole ex- istence is sanctified. Their scholastic life, their social life, their recreations all have supe r- natural values and all contribute in their ve ry nature to the glory of God. Looked at through the lens of spirituality, the year that is here closing is resplendent as a beatific vision. So regarded, this hour of graduation is a holy hour. These are in part the implica- tions of your degrees. The world needs many things today; it needs nothing so much as goodness, as holi- ness. It aspires to nothing so much as its own deification. It reincarnates humanity's oldest ambition; it yields to the devil's most ancient lie. On its own conditions it will be as God. Its most persistent quest is the de- feat of death, the immortality of the body. Its most daring inventions seek to recapture the qualities of the glorified body, its agility, its lucidity. With childish perversity it spends its vast resources seeking in itself and refusing from God the prerogatives of infinity. It is, as Edwin Arlington Robinson used to say, like a nursery of bewildered children trying to spell God with the wrong blocks. This giant Philistine world calls seductively perhaps, d e- risively perhaps, in challenge to the college graduate. What is your answer? It is the simple answer of revealed truth, more astounding, more skyscraping than the world's most dizzy dream. Men are as God, being the very sons of God. Men are immortal. They cannot die. Not death but the impossibility of d eath is the fact that gives one pause. Men have agility exceeding the stratosphere and the radio. They have knowledge penetrating to the source of the cosmic ray. They neecf only say "Our Father" to transcend all space, all time. They need only say "Come, Holy Spirit" 113

Address deli·L'ered b;z; Sister IJI. J1ladeleva, C.S.C. , Ph.D. , Litt. D. , president of Saint IJiary' s College, Notre Dame, 011 II 011 ors Night , Friday, June 3, 1938, at 7 :30 p. n1.

C OMMENCEMENT week is one of the most nearly universal phenomena of the western world. Late May and early June have become synonymous with graduation. A busi- ness world accedes for the moment to an aca- demic world. Civilian clothes give place to the cap and gown. The teacher and the stu- dent, clad in the robes of their profession, have right of way and the great pageant of education prevails. It is an imposing as it is an important spectacle. There was a day when our world expressed itself in terms of chivalry. The splendor of its achievement and the beauty of its attire read now like the poetry of history. There was a time when our world expressed itself through a great system of guilds. The strength of its organization and the wisdom of its meth- o~s read now like a Utopian text in social science. Today our world expresses itself in a num- ber of equally significant ways. As yet we can- not foresee which will be of last importance. We may describe our age as an age of science and invention. We may cite with glib facility the radio, the airplane. But let us advert for the moment to our annual commencements. In the perspective of the centuries this era may take significance from these recurring pageants of intellectual life. Fram every city, from every least village, from a thousand se- cluded campuses, march the great processions of college faculties and students, most beauti- ful and most terrible of all armies with ban- ners, for they march under the banners of the mind. Watching this pageant pass, we may well predict that, whatever its defects, it symbo- lizes our generation as an age of education. Watching it pass, we know that the cap and gown is a distinction. It is also a hiding place. 112

It marks its wearer academically; it conceals him _spiritually. It honors him with a degree, but it does not supernaturalize him with a de- gree. It exalts him as the son of his Alma Mater; it does not lift him up to the threshold of infinity as a son of God. The contemporary college makes extrava- gant claims for its graduates, but not extrava- gant enough. It promises them the conquest of the world; it does not promise them the Kingdom of Heaven. It offers them the finite wisdom of man; it says no word to them of the infinite wisdom of God. It insists that all the secrets of mortal existence be laid open to them; it makes no matter at all of the blind- ing apocalypse of their own immortality. The contemporary college in its very apotheosis of the human mind has obtusely ignored the in- finite ancestry and destiny of the human mind. In its biological accounting for the human body, it has neglected its theological origin. The organism that comes from slime quite logically returns to slime, but not its pattern. The mind that comes from God is god-like and returns to the pty of God. Among contemporary colleges are those that are built four-square with this Seat of Wisdom. Among the moving ranks in cap and gown are the great companies of the Holy Ghost, the soldiers of Christ, the Catholic col- lege graduates. They are distinguished b y something more pervasive than academic re- galia, less ambiguous than degrees. They have both a special claim to immortality, and a spe- cial mission and power to communicate this spiritual gift. It is time that the Catholic col- lege and the Catholic college graduate should advert to their peculiar and divine excellence. On every legitimate human and academic level, the Catholic school must be at least as good as the best secular school of its kind. J U KE, 1938