Mary Immaculate College

Graduation (2)

Friday 23rd Oct 2009

I am very glad to congratulate today’s graduates and to welcome you and your families and friends. The degrees and awards that you receive today show that the University of Limerick and Mary Immaculate College recognise your work and your achievement.  They also recognise what you owe to the quality and dedication of the staff who shared their knowledge and enthusiasm with you in the academic life of the College.  I know too that you are aware today of the help you received from all who work here and, of course, from one another.  As you receive these awards you will also be feeling gratitude for the support and love of your families and the friends who accompanied you through your life here.  Many of them are present to share this day with you, and they are most welcome.  But it is to you above all that we express our admiration and our congratulations.

You are graduating in a world which has changed dramatically in the space of a year or so.  The Celtic Tiger has collapsed and died.  Jobs that seemed secure and property whose value seemed capable only of rising are suddenly fragile.

Desmond Fennell has recently written a book [1] in which he asks what will happen when the apparently limitless possibility of forever doing more and buying more disappears.  Actually, he puts it more bluntly: he asks what will happen now that the possibility of always doing and buying more has disappeared!

He says that our Western world has gone down a road that lacks any deep meaning or sense.  When things go wrong there is no larger context which can look at the disasters and the pain that lie ahead. We feel lost; we find it hard to understand how it all happened so quickly. As someone put it: “If things are so good, how come they’re so bad?”

Less than a decade ago we celebrated the beginning of a new millennium with great hopes for a world of peace and prosperity, for the overcoming of poverty and prejudice. Instead we have seen that these hopes were far more fragile and these goals more difficult than we had ever imagined.

The truth is that our hopes are always fragile. Even when they are fulfilled they are never as indestructible as we think. They interacted with one another in ways that we see more clearly now.  The pursuit of wealth and progress was achieving amazing results, but at the same time it was devastating our environment to a degree we have not yet fully grasped. The method for pursuing peace is often the launching of a pre-emptive war.

We had lost sight of is a common vision that sees life in an overall context – the common vision which Europe has always found in its Judaeo Christian heritage. Now we have a society in which religious belief is seen as a private matter with nothing to say about what is called ‘the real world.  The result is that different aspirations for economic and social life are pursued without a clear understanding of how they fit into a bigger picture.  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks pointed out the fallacy of thinking that “we can edit God out of the language and leave our social world unchanged” [2]. The world cannot remain unchanged if the context in which life was understood and lived is removed.

This College is founded on the conviction that education, indeed the whole of human life, is a quest for the truth which is the context of all existence.  For almost fifty years of its life the only motto on the badge or insignia of the College was the word Veritas, Truth.

In every subject area there are truths that are valuable and worthy of respect.  But their greatest value is when they form part of the deeper truth that gives meaning and direction to human existence.   That is what can enable us to recover our bearings when we have lived as if something less than the truth could be our purpose in life.  We perhaps have to learn again that the value of the human person is not measured in terms of possessions or prestige or power.

In the history of Catholic education there have been failures, sometimes serious failures, in living up to that fundamental perspective. One thing that follows from the recognition that we are beings in quest of an overall truth is that we should be deeply respectful whenever we recognise that same quest at work in another human being.

When we meet other religious or philosophical attempts to follow that quest, we should see in them the reflection in another person or group of our own deepest human goal – to seek the truth. As our Mission Statement puts it: “The College seeks to foster… an openness to the religious tradition and values of each individual.”

The College is founded on another conviction – that God, the source of truth has shown himself to human beings, especially in the history of the Jewish people and in the life death and resurrection of the divine Word made flesh, That revelation is not something that limits and diminishes our freedom but opens our minds to what we could never have imagined for ourselves. It does not present anything that contradicts what is genuinely human, but rather offers it a fulfilment that no eye has seen, nor ear heard nor heart conceived (I Cor 2:9). In that quest that the word of God is a light for our path. It can happen that life, even academic life, may become a servant of something other than truth.

The danger was described by Pope Benedict last month in his challenge to academics gathered in Prague Castle:

…, is it not the case that frequently across the globe, the exercise of reason and academic research are – subtly and not so subtly – constrained to bow to the pressures of ideological interest groups and the lure of short-term utilitarian or pragmatic goals? What will happen if our culture builds itself only on… the viewpoints that are most vociferously promoted and most heavily funded? What will happen if in its anxiety to preserve a radical secularism, it detaches itself from its life-giving roots? Our societies will not become more reasonable or tolerant or adaptable but rather more brittle and less inclusive, and they will increasingly struggle to recognize what is true, noble and good.

I hope and believe that your time in the College will have given you the tools and the wisdom to see that the world in which we live is not absurd or hostile to see the vast expansion of human possibilities that the Christian vision offers (however much it is sometimes failed by those who express it).  The world was created by the Word who speaks to us, lighting the path towards a new creation. That word invites us to open our minds and hearts and it promises to lead us to the light that will expand all our knowledge into the vision of unlimited Truth and Beauty. May God’s word light your lives: Go raibh Briathar Dé mar lóchrann agaibh I gconaí.

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1 FENNELL, D., Ireland after the End of Western Civilisation, Athol Books, Belfast, 2009.
2 SACKS, J., The Persistence of Faith, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1990, p. 27