President O’Reilly’s Thanksgiving Remarks: In Gratitude for Our Founders

 

 

 

By Dr. Paul J. O’Reilly
President
Thomas Aquinas College
Remarks at the California Thanksgiving Dinner
November 24, 2024

 

St. Paul: “In all things give thanks, for this is the will of God” (1 Thessalonians, 5, v. 18).

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, we are reminded that we should be a grateful people, not only as a matter of justice, but acquiring the habit of gratitude is good because gratitude is a way to other virtues, including humility and charity.

We should give gratitude to God first and foremost, to our parents, and our benefactors, and at TAC we should be grateful for our chaplains, our tutors, staff, and fellow students.

Tonight, we will show gratitude to one of our founders, Mr. DeLuca. Our founding president, Dr. Ronald P. McArthur, once said: “The College simply wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Peter DeLuca.”

As we thank Mr. DeLuca for all he has done to make TAC possible, that prompts us to reflect on the gratitude we owe to the other founders of this College. To do so, I would like to reflect on the Founders’ vision for Thomas Aquinas College, and how they put it into practice.

Dr. McArthur speaking about the proposed TAC program before the College existed:

 

Our course of studies, in its content, order, and manner, will be explicitly governed by the following assumptions:

1. The Catholic faith is the governing principle of the entire life of a Christian, and thus also of his intellectual life.
2. Theology — the study of revealed truth — is intrinsically the most valuable kind of knowledge and compares to the other sciences as that for whose sake they are chiefly undertaken, and as a judge of their conclusions.
3. There is no opposition between revealed and natural knowledge …
4. The magisterium of the Church is the proximate norm for believers …

Mr. Berquist expanded on what Dr. McArthur called the third key assumption:

There is no better way of expressing, in brief formula, the mission of the College than this: faith seeking understanding [the words of St. Anselm.]. This defines the conception of the life of learning which animates all the founders long before the College was even thought of, and which animates every page of the Blue Book, and the entire project of founding and maintaining the College.

Dr. Neumayr elaborated on what “faith seeking understanding” means by reflecting on St. Thomas the Apostle:

Thomas … doubted the physical resurrection of the Lord and said he would not believe unless he could touch the sacred wounds … He insisted that he must first understand in order to believe — which is to say he refused to believe … faith, in this instance, depended entirely on verifiable evidence. Faith, for St. Anselm, does not depend upon understanding, rather, understanding depends upon faith ... [However] Lest Doubting Thomas be thought a poor model for believers, we should recall how he recovered from his disbelief. Upon touching the Lord’s wounds and receiving His rebuke, [the Apostle] Thomas proclaimed, “My Lord and my God.” With this he pronounced the deepest mystery of man’s salvation.

Dr. Neumayr also reflected on a main cause of the crisis in Catholic education that prompted the founders to start the College:

When faith started to lose its controlling place in the university, philosophies began to multiply. Creativity of thought was soon given a value above truth. … The distinctly Christian motive for the university was not merely wonder. This motive alone would not preserve the integrity of reason.

Dr. McArthur emphasized one way the College promotes “the integrity of reason”:

One cannot read the cherished books of Western civilization as simply of historical and humanistic interest without betraying their authors, whose principal purposes, by and large, were through their writings to speak not historically, but rather philosophically, proposing universal truths, abstracting from the here and now.

And Mr. Berquist expanded on this:

Since the College is aiming at the kind of education that is best in itself, every student pursues the same sequence of courses, which is designed to introduce him to every essential part of the intellectual life. The curriculum is structured in detail, basing itself upon the natural order of learning, and taking as examples and guides the works of the best minds in each of the disciplines. [The works studied] … are selected in view of the best possible treatment of the subject matter, rather than for historical or cultural reasons.

And then Mr. Berquist quotes the Blue Book to clarify what he has just said:

The sciences which pertain to liberal education are a community of unequals. But all are in harmony, as a consideration of their mutual relations has … indicated. The inferior sciences prepare the learner for the superior, while the superior sciences strengthen and illuminate the inferior.

Mr. DeLuca adds to this by having said:

Catholic liberal education … crowns liberal education with the Science of Sacred Doctrine. To the study of God and Divine things as they can be known by reasoning from ordinary experience, it adds the study of the truth about God and divine things as reason can know it from what God has revealed about Himself through Scripture and Sacred Tradition. This makes possible, even in this life, a Christian contemplation which is worthwhile in itself and is the highest form of happiness in this life.

Reflecting on TAC’s success, Mr. Berquist said:

Through its program and its pedagogy, the College has been successful in fostering an acquisition of critical habits of mind and the skills of rational discourse … In both reading and discussion, [students] look for the principles upon which a position is based, and which gave it shape; they consider its implications, and they attend to the inherent relation between part and whole. In general, they become well practiced at presenting and defending their views, at listening carefully to the views expressed by others, at raising relevant questions, and at separating what is central from what is peripheral.

Finally, Dr. McArthur:

Our attempt to educate is a quite successful undertaking which has had, as its effect, to show our students that reason can understand some very important aspects of reality, and that it can guide from high ground the moral life. It has been successful because we study the greatest minds, because we help our students work from within a great tradition of learning, and because we help them use their own minds to consider the questions — we are not, in other words, bookish, which is itself a perversion … There is not, in the U.S., another school which does what we do. This casts no aspersions upon any others, or their goodness.

So tonight, we give thanks for the Founders of Thomas Aquinas College:

We pray for the repose of the souls of Dr. McArthur, Dr. Neumayr, Mr. Berquist, Dr. George, Mr. Ellis, and Lt. Col. Lawton.

May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace, Amen.

Tonight, we also give thanks to Mr. DeLuca.

Often Mr. DeLuca is given credit for the practical skills he brought to TAC (and that is deserving indeed). But it should never be overlooked that Mr. DeLuca was a tutor first. He acquired a reputation as an excellent tutor of Theology, and especially of Freshman Theology. His love of Scripture, and his desire to unfold the hidden profundity of the Sacred text, inspired all his students. 

Also, without his leadership we would likely not have our second campus in New England. Right from the beginning, he championed the plan to expand to Massachusetts. He accompanied Dr. McLean and me when we had our first visit to Northfield. He was active in all the planning sessions. His unwavering confidence that we could start a second campus gave confidence to our Board of Governors.

So, Mr. DeLuca is a founder of Thomas Aquinas College, and now we can say a founder of two campuses.

I would like to present to Mr. DeLuca this copy of the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, the patron of the Chapel at Northfield, as a modest token of our gratitude.