Thursday 27 October 2005

Bishop Murray gave three short addresses at the three Conferring Ceremonies in Mary I. The particular occasions, Arts Degrees, Education Degrees and Education Diplomas.

Arts Degree

I am very pleased to share this happy occasion with today’s graduates and with your families and friends. In this conferring ceremony your gifts, your work, your achievements are recognised by the University of Limerick and by all of us here in Mary Immaculate College. As I congratulate you who are graduating, I also share the joy of everyone who celebrates this day with you, whether they are present with us, or here in spirit. I want also to acknowledge with thanks and admiration the many ways in which so many people in this College, academic staff, administrative staff, and everyone who plays a part in the life of the College, have made their own particular contribution to your arrival at this moment.

A technological world, where commercial values and motives exert ever more influence, tends to underestimate the importance of Arts degrees. The corporate sponsorship and research funds, on which third level education is increasingly dependent, flow towards areas that are thought to be more profitable and more useful.

In medieval universities, from which modern universities grew and from which they continue, to some extent, to draw their inspiration, the humanities were the foundation on which all education was built. Students spent several years studying the liberal arts before moving on to other faculties such as law, medicine or theology. We are living in different times; the scholars of those days would be in awe of the advances in education and the growth in technology and science that we take for granted. But they would perhaps think, as someone once put it, that not all the improvements have been for the better!

The medieval universities, and the cathedral schools from which many of them emerged, understood the importance of searching for the truth wherever it is to be found and of trying to integrate all of that knowledge so that it adds something to life, and makes life richer not primarily in financial terms but in human terms. They also knew that education should result in a committed life, which would serve the well being of the whole of the community.

An Ireland, or indeed a European Union, that failed to recognise the importance of those cultural roots, expressed particularly in the liberal arts, would be doomed. The Rector of the Catholic University of Eichstätt recently put it like this:

If Europe, as it draws together, fails to bear in mind that, for all its divisions and its variety of countries, it is rooted in a shared tradition of spiritual values with a common view of humanity – which is clearly Christian in character – it will be reduced to nothing more than a group of countries thrown together as a community of interests.1

We don’t need to know a lot about the history of our continent to know that a community of interests between countries is not enough to provide a secure foundation for peace.

You have had the opportunity to reflect in some depth on aspects of our cultural heritage. As you revised for exams and struggled with projects it might not have felt like a cultural experience – but that’s what it was. I hope that that will become clearer to you in the years ahead that you have been learning to appreciate the tradition that makes us who we are. It is the hope of the College and of the University of Limerick that the awards that you receive today are a sign that what you have received here will equip you to reflect wisely on the larger human implications of our society, of the choices we to make and the priorities we adopt.

The education you have received here is also a responsibility. I hope that the values and the commitment to truth that you have developed here, the vision of Christian hope and openness that is an essential quality of this College, will flourish in you. I pray that in your lives you may welcome and spread the fundamental truth that the Catholic ethos of the College seeks to convey, that God’s truth and God’s word are a light for our path. Comhgáirdeas libh uile is go n-eirí bhúr mbóthar libh.

Education Degrees and Diplomas

I am very glad to congratulate today’s graduates and to welcome your families and friends. The degrees and diplomas that you receive today are not just pieces of paper. They are signs that the University of Limerick and Mary Immaculate College recognise your work and your achievement. They crystallise not just your efforts but the expertise and dedication of those who shared their knowledge and enthusiasm with you in the academic life of the College and the commitment and support and friendship you received from all the people who work here and from your fellow students. They are also a recognition of the support and love of your families and of the friends who accompanied you through your life here and indeed in the life that led you to the College in the first place.

You graduate at a time when education in Europe appears to be taking on a continent-wide aspect which it has not had since the Middle Ages. There was a time when professors and students moved around Europe in a very natural way from university to university and from country to country. The EU programmes which promote this educational cooperation in Europe carry names which reflect the heritage out of which the European traditions of education arose: Socrates, Erasmus, Comenius, Leonardo da Vinci and Grundtvig.

The Bologna process and the European Credit Transfer System promise to be the beginning of a reestablishment of that easy movement among European Universities. That is an ideal very much to be welcomed; it opens up marvellous possibilities to you and will greatly broaden the options open to the pupils you will teach.

Your time in this College has given you an understanding of the nature of education. The challenge that remains amid all this progress is to value and appreciate the educational heritage of Europe. The richness of the idea of education that we have inherited is not something that can be taken for granted. You may share a certain unease at the degree to which higher education in every part of the world seems to be more and more dependent on its ability to generate private funds with the risk that it may become excessively tied to commercial interests and to short term economic priorities.

The educational heritage of Europe teaches us first and foremost that education is a search for truth. It is founded on the conviction that there is a truth to be found and that different truths discovered along the different paths like science, theology, mathematics, history and so on cannot ultimately contradict one another. The regrettable case of Galileo arose precisely because of the certainty on both sides that there could not be two contradictory truths, that investigations properly conducted in different spheres were approaches to the same truth. Therefore the university sought to draw all forms of knowledge into a humanly enriching synthesis. Its role was to seek the truth along all paths and from all sources. The philosophy and theology of the Middle Ages were hugely enriched by studying pagan and Muslim writers.

It is significant that those five names chosen by the EU to designate its educational programmes contain, one of the great Greek philosophers, two bishops (neither of them Catholic), a priest, and the genius who, among many other things, produced magnificent religious art including the famous fresco of the Last Supper in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. All of that sits a little uneasily with the reluctance to mention God in the proposed constitutional treaty for Europe!

As University of Limerick graduates in education, alumni of Mary Immaculate College, I hope that you will be conscious of the opportunities that this reestablishment of the academic unity of Europe offers. But I hope you will also be aware of the danger that we could build something, not just at university level but in the whole of education, that instead of giving new life to that rich heritage would only be a shell, a facade, a betrayal, because it would be guided primarily by economic priorities. We could build something that would lack the driving force of the search for the truth that enriches our humanity. This College was founded on the belief that Christ is the Truth that sets us free. May the Word of God be a light for your path as you move into a new stage of your lives, with our prayers and good wishes and our confidence and pride in you. Comhgáirdeas libh uile is go gcuire Dia rath ar bhúr saothar.

Education Degrees

I am delighted to be able to join in congratulating all of you who are receiving degrees and diplomas today and to share with you and your families and friends in this celebration of your achievements. I also congratulate the academic and administrative staff of Mary Immaculate, and everyone who is part of the life of the College, your fellow students and all those who have been part of this journey for you. Today your work is being recognised by the University of Limerick. It is a joy for all of us to share in celebrating what you have achieved.

In being conferred with University degrees you take your place in a long tradition that goes back at least to the foundation , in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, of the first European universities, beginning with Bologna, Oxford and Paris, most of which developed out of monastic or cathedral schools.

It is a proud heritage that you now share. The universities of Europe developed a tradition of scholarship, of respect for the various branches of learning, of researching and reflecting across disciplines in the search for truth. I hope that you, as graduates and educators yourselves, will value the inheritance which is yours. You will live your lives in a society that needs the richness of that tradition more than it ever did – but which is by no means certain to retain its most valuable aspects.

A fundamental question that university education faces is that the scale and breadth of the knowledge today makes it difficult to see the wood for the trees. Pope John Paul wrote that human reason has for many people “wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights”1. The Christian tradition of learning and education believed that there could be no contradiction between different areas of truth, and that faith, far from destroying that truth, “only reveals it the more”2.

When I watch a cartoon on television I am always fascinated by the moment when one of the characters travelling at top speed goes over the edge of the cliff. He runs for several paces before noticing that there is no solid ground under his feet. Might that be a warning for us?

The tradition of higher education in Europe has been an essential part of the solid ground on which our civilisation has been built. The university was and is a place where different disciplines and different cultures could encounter one another and together meet the issues of their time and the challenges of society.

The tradition that you inherit would have regarded the huge expanse of knowledge that is now available as a great resource but would have seen its task as enabling all that information and knowledge to grow into wisdom, to foster, as the College’s Mission Statement puts it, “the intellectual, spiritual, personal and professional development of students”. The deepest purpose of third level education, and of all education, is to enrich people in their humanity, for their own sakes and in order that they may play a part in enriching the whole human family.

This College has tried to share with you an understanding of the solid ground that characterises its tradition. Our hope is that you will not find yourselves running frantically in mid air. The College has tried to promote a sense of identity enriched by the awareness of its Catholic tradition, of ‘the cultures languages and traditions of Ireland’, of ‘cultural diversity’, of ‘openness to the religious tradition and values of each individual’ and has tried to foster ‘a spirit of justice and compassion in the service of others’.

That is the contribution that a Catholic College like this has to make to a world that sometimes seems to have no solid ground beneath its feet. That is what we in Mary Immaculate, together with the University of Limerick, hope you will take away with you. You are on a solid path, go raibh Briathar Dé mar lóchrann agaibh.

+Donal Murray
Bishop of Limerick