Archbishop Gomez: “Your Mission as a Catholic College”

By the Most Rev. José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles
Homily from the Mass for the Feast of Pope St. John Paul II
Inauguration of Paul J. O’Reilly as President of Thomas Aquinas College
October 22, 2022

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

I am honored to celebrate this Holy Mass with you. We pray today that Our Lord’s hand be upon President O’Reilly and his family. And we ask St. Thomas Aquinas to intercede and guide this great college that bears his name. We ask his prayers for the new president and for students, faculty, administrators, the Board of Governors, and all your benefactors.

“We ask St. Thomas Aquinas to intercede and guide this great college that bears his name.”

The Universal Church today remembers St. John Paul II, our beloved pope. So, we ask his intercession today, too. As we know, John Paul was a great champion of Catholic higher education. For many years, he served as a university professor in Poland. The Catholic college, he said famously, is “born from the heart of Church.”

This week, I was reading his first homily again. I can still remember the excitement when he was elected pope. I was a new priest, ordained just a few months. I remember first hearing these words; it was on this date, in 1978. St. John Paul said: “Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors for Christ. To his saving power, open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization and development. Do not be afraid. Christ knows ‘what is in man.’ He alone knows it.”

These words are still thrilling, still powerful. And these words describe the mission of the Catholic Church in our times. In a special way, they speak to your mission as a Catholic college. You are called to raise up a new generation of apostles, who are not afraid to open every door for Christ, to shine his light into every area of our culture and society; to bring every heart to the encounter with the living God.

St. John Henry Newman said that a Catholic college gives students the power to perceive how everything fits together in the “circle of knowledge.” This circle includes the knowledge of the sciences and history, theology, morality, and the arts.

This is your vocation. You are sharers in the work of truth, in the noble work of helping young women and men to see and understand the unity of knowledge, the unity in creation. And in this, my dear brothers and sisters, your work participates in the Lord’s great plan for salvation history.

As we heard in today’s first reading, and again in the psalm, God’s designs for creation and for history are “catholic.”

The prophet Isaiah tells us today: “All the ends of the earth will behold the salvation of our God.” In the psalm, we have that beautiful image of all the “families of nations” giving praise and glory to God. God created this world to be one, and He created the human race to be one. And His plan for the fullness of time is to reconcile all things in Jesus Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.

We are here to be servants of this plan. We are here to unite all things in Jesus Christ — to unite all creation and every nation in the love of Jesus Christ and the praise of His name.

The way of Christ is the way of love, as we hear in the Gospel today. This scene is one of most tender in all of the Scriptures. As we know, it is after the Resurrection; this is the third and final time that Jesus reveals Himself to His apostles in the Gospel of John. He meets them by the seaside, and He builds a charcoal fire while they are out fishing.

And we remember that it was by a “charcoal fire” that St. Peter denied Our Lord three times on the night He was betrayed. So, now Jesus asks Peter three times: “Do you love me?”

It is such a beautiful scene of confession, repentance, and reconciliation. We have all experienced this in our own lives. No matter what we might do, no matter how far we might fall away, we know: We can always turn to Jesus and find forgiveness. He is the Lord of second chances, the Lord of new beginnings. For St. Peter, for you and for me; for all humanity. That is a beautiful truth.

So, when we hear this Gospel today, we need to put ourselves in St. Peter’s shoes. Jesus is challenging you and me today: “Do you love me more than these?” Do we love Him — more than we love ourselves; more than we love our securities and comforts? Do we love Him enough to confront our fears and overcome our weakness?

“In your vocation as a Catholic college, the Lord entrusts you with this same responsibility: to feed and tend these young hearts and minds, to give them knowledge of the truth — the truth about who we are, and how we are made; about why we are here, and how we ought to live.”

And love is not just words. We can’t just tell Jesus we love Him. He knows that already. “Lord, You know all things, You know that I love you,” Peter says today. The point is that we need to prove our love — by our actions, by the way we live, by the way we give. That’s why Jesus tells Peter, three times. “Feed my lambs … Tend my sheep. … Feed my sheep.”

My brothers and sisters, Jesus is talking to you and me. He calls each of us, just as He calls St. Peter, to be a shepherd of souls. We need to feed His lambs and tend His sheep — to serve the people in our lives with love, to give as Jesus gives.

In your vocation as a Catholic college, the Lord entrusts you with this same responsibility: to feed and tend these young hearts and minds, to give them knowledge of the truth — the truth about who we are, and how we are made; about why we are here, and how we ought to live. Only in this wisdom, only in Jesus Christ, can we flourish in this world and know the love that never ends in the world to come. May this wisdom give us the courage to love — to open wide every door for Christ, and to proclaim His salvation.

St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us! St. John Paul II, pray for us! And may Our Mother Mary, Seat of Wisdom, keep us always close in the love of her son.