May 13, 2011

Baccalaureate Mass ⁱ for Christendom College, Class 2011

Most Rev. James D. Conley, S.T.L., Auxiliary Bishop of Denver, delivered the following homily during the Baccalaureate Mass for Christendom College's Graduating Class of 2011 in Front Royal, Virginia.

My dear friends in Christ,

I am honored to celebrate this Baccalaureate Mass with you this evening honoring the Christendom College graduating class of 2011.

I have always enjoyed my relationships with Christendom and its students over the years. And I have deep admiration for what you are accomplishing here.

Christendom is evidence of what our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI has called, the “diakonia of truth which the Church exercises in the midst of humanity.”ⁱⁱ He spoke these words in an address to Catholic college presidents at Catholic University of America during his pastoral visit to the United States in April of 2008.

You have consecrated yourselves in this great service of the truth. You have built your school on the foundation of Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life — and the true light that enlightens every man and woman.

Christendom testifies to the Church’s faith that Christ is the light of the world, the light of life, and the light that scatters all darkness.ⁱⁱⁱ

This is one of the lessons in our first reading this evening taken from the Acts of the Apostles. Christ comes to Saul as a radiant light flashing from heaven.

Notice what happens to Saul. The passage we just heard says: “When his eyes were opened, he could see nothing.”

Of course, when we hear language about “eyesight” and “light” in the New Testament, we usually don’t have to look too deeply to find that there is some baptismal symbolism at work. That is true with the first reading this evening.

For the early Christians, baptism was preeminently a sacrament of illumination. Those preparing to be baptized were called photi-zomenoi, a Greek word that means “those coming into the light.”^iv

In baptism, the eyes of the heart, once darkened by sin, are opened to the new light of Christ. We walk now in light not in darkness. We are called children of light.^v

This is what’s happening in the first reading with the conversion of Saul, who is destined to become St. Paul, the apostle and light to the Gentiles.

His encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus exposes his inner blindness, the moral darkness inside him. This is symbolized in his physical blindness.

Saul’s recognition of his sinfulness leads to repentance and penance — symbolized by his fasting from food and water for three days.

Then Ananias, representing the faith of the Church, is sent to lay hands on him and baptize him. Paul receives the gift of the Holy Spirit and immediately the scales fall from his eyes. He regains his sight and begins proclaiming Jesus as the Son of God.

Among other reasons, we read this episode during the Easter season as a powerful symbol for what happens to each one of us in our baptism.

Our encounter with Christ, and our faith in him which we confess in baptism, gives us new eyes — the eyes of faith. Our faith in Christ changes the way we see the world and the way we see ourselves.

This faith — and the new insight faith gives us — is the starting point of any authentic idea of Catholic higher education.

True Catholic higher education joins the insights of faith with our natural faculties of intellect and reason. 

Our newest blessed, Blessed Pope John Paul II, gave us this inspiring image: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. And God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth — in a word, to know himself — so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”^vi

By faith and reason we are to seek the truth about God, the truth about our lives, and the truth about the world we live in. That’s the purpose of Catholic higher education.

Catholic education is built on the premise that man is a truth-seeking creature. As St. Thomas Aquinas said: “It is natural to man to strive for knowledge of the truth.”^vii
 
We long to know the truth about who we are and where we come from, the truth about the meaning of life, about how the world works, about why bad things happen, about what lies beyond this life. Questions about the permanent things.

These are the great questions from which cultures and civilizations are created. In the West these questions have driven our greatest discoveries and advances in the sciences. They animate our most sublime poetry, literature, art, architecture, music, and drama. 

The search for truth has always been what higher education has been all about — until recently.

Until recently, it was assumed that the educated man or woman was a lover of knowledge and a possessor of truth. Wisdom and virtue were the ideals. And wisdom and virtue were understood to be products of what Aquinas described as our natural striving for knowledge of the truth.

Today in higher education we see a different paradigm. It reflects a basic confusion about human nature and destiny; about what is good for us; and about the nature of the universe and God.

Higher education today reflects a profound divorce of faith and reason. In the academy today, reason alone is seen as a credible source for the truth about things. Only what can be “proven” by the canons of the scientific method is considered “true” or “real.”

In the words of the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind at the beginning of the Dickens classic, Hard Times: “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”^viii

But my friends: You can’t fly with only one wing. The wing of reason is not sufficient. Without the wing of faith, the human search for truth can’t get off the ground.

That is what’s happening in much of higher education today. Knowledge has become one-dimensional. The only knowledge that matters is a practical, utilitarian, problem-solving kind of knowledge. There is no appetite any more for what the philosophers call “Being,” or the mysteries of existence. 

It’s a basic tenet now in most branches of higher education that truths and moral absolutes don’t even exist apart from the egos and desires of individuals. This is what our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, has referred to as “the dictatorship of relativism.”^ix And it is a real dictatorship. It is almost impossible in many departments in the modern academy to argue that there are objective realities of “the good,” “the beautiful,” and “the true.”

My dear friends who are about to graduate: Be grateful that you received your education at Christendom! Give thanks for the administration and faculty, your fellow students — and most of all for your parents!

You have had the privilege to truly seek and contemplate the truth. You have had the opportunity to experience what St. Augustine called gaudium de veritate. The joy that comes from knowing the truth.^x

You have built your education on the foundation of faith and reason. You know, as we profess in our Creed, that there is a world beyond our senses, that there are things both seen and unseen, visible and invisible.

Blessed John Henry Newman once wrote: “the invisible world is more real to me than the visible world which is constantly passing away before my eyes.”^xi

This is the core faith that Jesus teaches in the Gospel we have heard this evening. This passage from the Gospel of John, chapter 6, happens to be one of my favorite Gospel passages about the real presence of the Holy Eucharist and had a tremendous influence on my conversion to the Catholic faith.

The interlocutors of Jesus in the synagogue can’t understand how he can give them his flesh to eat. They are stuck at the literal level, the level of the senses. They think he wants them to feed on his human flesh.

Jesus doesn’t give them much help either. In fact, he piles insult upon injury. Not only must we eat his flesh, he says, we must also drink his blood.

When we read the original Greek text, we see that Jesus is being even more provocative. Four times he uses a vulgar word for “eating.” The Greek word he uses connotes a loud, crunching kind of eating — a word often used to describe the way animals feed. 

In his commentary on this passage in St. John’s Gospel, the Church Father St. John Chrysostom said: “Men are nailed to the things of this life.”^xiii

Isn’t that true, my friends?

Without faith, we are bound here below to what we can see and experience through our senses.

In the Gospel this evening, Jesus is trying to unfasten us from our preoccupation with the things of this life. He is trying to set us free from the prisons of the material world and the materialist mindset that believes only what it can apprehend by the physical senses.

Jesus seeks to enlighten the eyes of our hearts ^xiv— so that we can see the things that are above, the things unseen, the realities of the Spirit.

He wants us to see that all creation is a sacrament of the Creator, that the things of this life are signs and instruments by which we attain to the life to come.

This way of seeing, this sacramental understanding of the world, can only be gained by faith in Jesus Christ.

My friends, especially you dear graduates: You have been given the gift of that faith! And you have been given the gift of this fine education to nurture that faith! Blessed Pope John Paul once said: “In the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences.”^xv

And before we continue in our celebration of this Eucharist, I need to point out an important coincidence.

Thirty years ago today, in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, an assassin’s bullet nearly took the life of Blessed John Paul II. He was always convinced that it was Our Lady of Fatima, whose feast we also celebrate today, who spared his life.

One year later on this day, on May 13, 1982, our Holy Father travelled to Fatima to pray in thanksgiving to Our Lady for sparing his life. He placed the bullet that had been removed from his body into the crown of the pilgrim statue where it lies today. Our Holy Father always had a penchant for drama!

Imagine what our world would be like today had our Holy Father been killed by that bullet — just two and a half years into his pontificate. It is frightening to think. But the Providence of God and the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima intervened on that day. And we are all the beneficiaries of his tremendous 26 year legacy of faith.

In the designs of Providence, you are celebrating your graduation on this important anniversary, just weeks after his beatification. I pray that you will always look to our new blessed for guidance and wisdom in your lives. 

So let us give thanks for Blessed Pope John Paul’s courageous faith as we continue in our celebration of this Holy Eucharist.

Faith is a gift. God gives us this gift to share. So faith is always a mission. And your graduation is a commissioning. You are being sent forth from this campus and into the world to spread the good news of the Gospel — to share the gift of faith.

My prayer for you, dear graduates, is that in everything, you work to build the culture of life and the civilization of love. Use your education to spread the light of Christian charity and truth wherever you go. Offer everything you do for the love of God and for the love of your neighbor.

And as our Lord tells us in the Gospel tonight, if you stay close to him in the Eucharist — he will abide in you and you will abide in him. That is the greatest truth we can ever know — the knowledge that in him we can have eternal life.

Footnotes:

i. Readings, Friday of the Third Week of Easter: Acts 9:1–20; John 6:52–59
ii. Address at Catholic University of America (April 17, 2008).
iii. John 1:9; 8:12; 9:5.
iv. Danielou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre Dame, 1956), 19; compare Catechism, 1216.
v. John 14:6; 8:12;12:36.
vi. Fides et Ratio, 1.
vii. On Evil, Bk. 9, 1; Pope John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesia, 1, n. 2.
viii. Hard Times, 1.
ix. Homily, Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff (April 18, 2005).
x. Confessions, Bk. 10, chap. 23, 33; Pope John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesia, 1, n. 2.
xi. “The Invisible World,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons (Ignatius, 1987), 852.
xii. John 6:54, 56, 57, 58, Grk. = trogein.
xiii. See Edwyn Clement Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel (Faber and Faber, 1947), 292.
xiv. Eph. 1:18.
xv. Address upon arriving in Fatima, Portugal (May 12, 1982).