MESSAGE TO GRADUATES

april 26, 2008

Soon students from the Catholic and Public School Systems of the Valley will join their peers in high school or college campuses across the nation in one of the more hallowed of American academic traditions – the graduation ceremony. To graduates everywhere I address this week’s column.

Your graduation ceremony is important to you, no doubt, but it is also important to us, members of the families and communities who have done our best to provide you with the personal support, and with the institutions, resources, and programs of learning that have brought you to this day. Your graduation gives us a way of recognizing and honoring each of you for having successfully completed your academic programs. It is our way of saluting and praising you.

For high school graduates, the rite of passage on which you embark is like a two-edged sword. On the one hand, you will begin to enjoy new levels of freedom, self-sufficiency, and self-direction. On the other hand, you will soon be feeling the weight of new burdens of responsibility, which will impose on you unprecedented demands for maturity, self-possession, and service.

For college graduates, it is also our way of passing the torch of future leadership and responsibility to you. Up to now you have been entrusted to our care as our sons and daughters, our future and our hope. Now, we begin to entrust ourselves to you. As you have had to depend on our help and support in the past, so will we more and more depend on you in the future to offer us your strength, leadership, assistance and support. Your graduation provides us with the opportunity to say, “We need you, and we believe in you.”

Your education will certainly play a significant part in determining your future happiness, and the quality of your contribution to tomorrow’s society, culture, and institutions, but the most significant factor is something you could not acquire directly from your education.

Your book learning can cultivate your mental faculties and impart vast knowledge – benefits which are by no means trivial. This, however, is not the most important; in fact, it can make you overconfident and thus serve as an impediment to what you most need: wisdom.

Wisdom is most the most vital element in life, and wisdom cannot be “taught”. It can only be “caught,” and it is caught best by those who recognize its beauty and importance, who desire it, and who understand that personal virtue is essential to attaining it.

This point was made most powerfully in a self-reflective book written by Albert Speer, entitled Inside the Third Reich. Speer had been Hitler’s trusted Reich Marshall, and because of his participation in Hitler’s monstrous war crimes, he was tried and convicted of them at the Nuremburg trials after World War II.

During his subsequent 20-year imprisonment (1946-1966), Speer reflected on why Hitler had been able to ascend to power, and on how it was that the people allowed themselves to be caught up in his infantile and grandiose vision of Germans as a “super-race”. Inside the Third Reich was the fruit of that reflection.

One of the book’s most powerful points was its analysis of how the German elite had become so blinded by pride. It was precisely because Germans were so well educated and so advanced in the sciences that they were so easily persuaded to assume the right to dominate the earth and impose their will on others. It was because of their superior academic training that they were unable to see the arrogance with which they regarded themselves and the disdain with which they regarded the peoples of other nations or ethnicities.

They could not grasp, in Speer’s view, that they were building a Tower of Babel. They could not see that they had lost their religious soul, and with that loss, the loss also of virtue and civility. Thus disposed, they were easily able to justify in their own minds every incremental advance, one step at a time, into the dark night of inhumanity and horror.

In the end, they had knowledge without wisdom, commitment without virtue. They possessed technological power and will power, but no integrity or moral compass.

It is said, and said well, that the corruption of the best is the worst. Nazi Germany stands as one of history’s most tragic and lamentable testaments to the truth of that saying.

Pride comes before the fall. None of us is exempt from the temptation to pride, and if not resisted, it induces blindness and leads, sooner or later, to evil. The wise know this!

So how can one attain true wisdom, so as to be able to judge well and live well? How can one come to know what really matters in life, so as to live free of empty ambitions, foolish rivalries, anxieties, and strife? How can one come to know and live in the truth, free of the deceit and confusion of ideologies and propaganda?

The Bible says, “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7). This Scripture means a deep reverence for the Almighty rather than a servile fear of God. Whenever one forgets that God is our origin, our destiny, and our greatest good, first wisdom is lost; one folly after another follows in the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment where they cannot be found. All wisdom resides in God, and it is to God that we must have recourse in order to attain it. When we turn to him, we find that, truly, his word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path (cf. Psalm 119:105).

The schooling in wisdom that the Word of God’s offers continues throughout life. Once they have entered this school and discovered what a superior education it offers, the wise choose never to depart or “graduate” from it.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 28-Apr-2008 8:38 sitemap