From the Desk of the President
Standing by Christ's Side, President's Dinner
(Summer 2007 Newsletter)
[Index
of Past Articles by President Dillon]
It is my privilege to be able to congratulate you, the Class of
2007, on behalf of the entire faculty and staff, for having formally
completed your studies at Thomas Aquinas College. Your accomplishment
is noteworthy. After four years of serious work in Plato, Aristotle,
St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Euclid, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein,
among so many other difficult but important authors, we say that
you are now ready to make a beginning, to have a commencement. Nevertheless,
this is a time to pause and reflect on how far you have come since
you entered our halls in August of 2003.
This is also time for gratitude to all those who have made possible
your immersion in Catholic liberal education. Thanks are due to
your parents, of course, to whom you owe gratitude beyond measure;
to your tutors, who have made many personal sacrifices in order
to educate you well; to the College's benefactors, without whom
the College simply would not exist; and to God Himself, upon whom
you depend for everything and whose provident care has led you here.
Give Back to Him
Now that you have completed a formative phase of your lives and
must determine what you are to do henceforth, one thing is absolutely
clear: You are not the authors of your own existence or the sources
of the goods you possess. You owe your entire lives to the goodness
of God, and whatever else you do, you must reflect on this and order
your lives to giving back to Him, as small as that may be in comparison
to what He has done for you.
Of course, one of God's great gifts to you is your Catholic faith
and now, with your education here, something of an advanced understanding
of that faith. Remember that each of us has the Faith first through
the grace of God, but also because it was passed on from the Apostles
to generation after generation of Christians down through the centuries,
often at the cost of the blood of martyrs. Now it is your turn to
step up; it is your turn to help pass on the Faith. This must be
done prayerfully and with charity and humility, but it must be done.
Be Agents in Effecting Good
I cannot help but think of that wonderful passage in St. Thomas'
treatise On the Teacher, which you read in sophomore year, where
St. Thomas considers two opposed and extreme views about the bringing
into being of natural forms, the acquisition of virtues, and the
acquiring of scientific knowledge. Without my rehearsing the details
of his argument, let me remind you that St. Thomas observes that
both extreme positions lack a reasonable basis. "For the first
opinion," he says, "excludes proximate causes, attributing
solely to first causes all effects which happen in lower natures,
and this derogates from the order of the universe, which is made
up of the order and connection of causes, since the first cause
by pre-eminence of its goodness gives other beings not only their
existence but also their existence as causes. The second position,
too, falls into practically the same difficulty." What is wonderful
here-what St. Thomas is saying by implication-is that out of God's
sheer goodness, He shares His causality. He allows us, in fact,
to take part in His providence, to be agents in effecting good.
Now as you ponder making your way into the larger world and being
agents of good, I have for you good news and bad news. The good
news is that what you have learned here will, if you nurture it,
continue to grow in your souls and blossom beautifully. You have
undertaken your education under the light of the Faith, and your
class quote, taken from St. Anselm, reflects that: "For I do
not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe that
I may understand."
Let me urge you not to stop your seeking of understanding. Don't
presume that because you have spent four years here, you now have
things all figured out or that your judgments and opinions are likely
to be better than those of others because, after all, you have had
a genuine Catholic liberal education. Imitate, instead, our patron,
who was inquiring for his whole life and who was willing to learn
from any source, since the truth is independent of the minds that
discover it. His willingness to abandon himself to the truth, submit
himself to the Faith, and not be dazzled by his own brilliance is
a model for us, whose intellectual gifts pale by comparison. Like
St. Thomas, nourish your Catholic faith and continue humbly seeking
understanding. Do not squander your intellectual gifts, nor "hide
your light under a bushel," as Our Lord says. You offer great
hope for our Church and for our country. Time and again I hear this
from admirers of the College and admirers of you. You must, in turn,
take seriously your responsibility to grow in your knowledge and
love of God and to evangelize; in this way those hopes can be realized-but
the good news is that you are prepared to bring faith and reason
to a needy world.
Proceed with Courage
Now the bad news: This world, by and large, will not be receptive
to your efforts, and you will be ridiculed and scorned by many.
It seems to me that with each passing year Christianity is more
and more despised by a post-modern world that seems intent on cutting
itself away from its moorings and drifting aimlessly into dangerous
waters. A world intoxicated with pleasure will laugh at calls for
restraint and sober action. A world awash in relativism and cynicism
will not heed reason. A world bound to the material will not rise
up to the spiritual. The cure for so many of the world's ills can
be found in the moral teachings of our Faith, even leaving aside
our transcendent destiny. However, what is the solution is seen
as a problem in a world that is willfully turning itself upside-down
and rejecting both nature and God.
Yet there remains some good news, and that is that you are not alone.
If we look at the gospel for this coming Saturday-not the one that
will be read in our Baccalaureate Mass, which will be a special
Mass of the Holy Spirit, but the one read in churches throughout
the world on the day of your commencement-we see the following words
of Our Lord to His disciples: "If the world hates you, realize
that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world
would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world,
and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you. Remember
the word I spoke to you, 'No slave is greater than his master.'
If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept
my word, they will also keep yours. And they will do all these things
to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who
sent me." That's the entire gospel on your commencement day.
So take heart. You know that if you truly endeavor to live your
faith and to uphold truth and goodness, you are standing by Christ's
side. And as St. Paul tells us, that is the winning side. There
is, in reality, no other alternative. So you must proceed with courage
and make efforts to help spread the Faith and to help bring others,
as you can, to the knowledge of God.
Remain in Christ
Now, how are you to do this? How are you to be sustained in upholding
faith, truth, and goodness in a world increasingly hostile to rationality
and moral rectitude, let alone to any subordination to the divine?
The gospel for the Mass of today, this very day on which you have
formally completed your studies at the College, provides the answer.
This is the gospel where Christ calls Himself the vine and us the
branches. We have been pruned by His word, says Our Lord, and we
must remain in Him. Listen again to His words: "Whoever remains
in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you
can do nothing." What a wonderful assurance: If we remain in
Christ, we shall indeed bear much fruit. But we should especially
remember these words, "without me you can do nothing."
Lives of Love, Patience, Humility and Obedience
We on the faculty of the College have, on the side of nature, attempted
to help develop well your intellectual habits and your dispositions
to moral virtue. Pray continually that God will give you the grace
to help you in your quest to know and love Him better, to do His
will, and to bring Christ to a world so desperately in need of Him.
Each year at this dinner I exhort the graduating seniors, and now
you, to reflect on St. Thomas' prayer for after Communion, in which
he petitions that the Holy Eucharist perfect him in charity and
patience, in humility and obedience. It is my hope that these four
virtues will especially be the marks of graduates of Thomas Aquinas
College and that your lives will be characterized by an intense
love of God and selfless concern for the good of your neighbor,
patience with the failings of others as Christ is patient with ours,
humility in all your activities, recognizing that your excellences
are not of your own making but are gifts from God, and obedience
to God's will, the true test of humility, so well-demonstrated to
us by Our Lord Himself.
Please keep your alma mater in your prayers-that we always stay
true to the teaching Church and to the will of God, who is the source
and end of all that is, including this college. May Our Lady of
Perpetual Help watch over you, may your future be resplendent with
good things, and may the friendships you have forged here continue
to grow, especially your friendship with Christ.
God bless you all!
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Summer 2007
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