May 14, 2011

Acceptance Remarks: Honorary Doctorate from Christendom College, Class of 2011

Most Rev. James D. Conley, S.T.L., Auxiliary Bishop of Denver, delivered the following acceptance remarks upon reception of an Honorary Doctorate from Christendom College during the 2011 graduation ceremonies in Front Royal, Virginia.

My dear friends,

I am deeply honored to accept this Honorary Doctorate.

I have always enjoyed my relationships with Christendom and its students over the years.

During the years I served in the Vatican, I was also privileged to teach theology to a tremendous group of students on Christendom’s Rome campus. I was happy that I was able to offer Mass for them regularly too. I still keep in touch with many of them. They are fine young men and women.

I have deep admiration for all that you are accomplishing here. Christendom is evidence that the Church’s higher educational mission remains vital.

You are a sign of contradiction and hope in an academic world that is increasingly secularized and often politicized. Christendom is upholding with grace the classical ideal of education as the pursuit of truth, virtue and wisdom.

Christendom embodies the moral vision of Catholic higher education that Blessed John Henry Newman wrote about more than 150 years ago.

Here, as Newman wrote, the student “apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence … a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are: freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.” ⁱ

In Christendom we see how vital the Church’s mission of higher education is to the new evangelization.

St. Paul said that God chooses the small and the weak to put to shame the strong and the powerful.ⁱⁱ I always think about that when I think about Christendom. You show us that “small is beautiful” in the words of the great German economist, E.F. Schumacher! You are the real change-makers in our culture, even though relatively speaking you lack the size and the endowments of so many larger Catholic institutions of higher learning.

Speaking from the heart of the Church with a confident Catholic identity, you are forming talented and creative disciples, equipping them with a Christian vision of life, culture and history, and sending them out well prepared to be leaders in the contemporary world.

St. Augustine said famously: “Intellege ut credas; crede ut intellegas.” In order to believe you must understand. In order to understand you must believe.ⁱⁱⁱ

In these beautiful words, we see the adventure of joy that is the pursuit of truth.

When we believe, we can understand the truth revealed by Christ. The truth that this world is created out of love and is created for the glory of God. The truth that, in the great expression of St. Ireneaus: “The glory of God is man fully alive: moreover man’s life is the vision of God.”^iv

So I accept this Honorary Doctorate proudly and with profound gratitude. I am truly honored.

I pray that this will be a great day for all of you — administrators, faculty, parents, and especially you who are graduating!

Let us consecrate ourselves once more in the service of the truth. To once again quote Augustine: Let all of us today “acknowledge ourselves as fellow disciples of a single Teacher,” Jesus Christ, our Lord.^v

Footnotes:

i. The Idea of a University, Preface.
ii. 1 Cor. 1:26–29.
iii. Sermon 43, 9; Ex Corde Ecclesia, 5.
iv. Catechism, 293–294.
v. Sermon, 23, 2.