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By
Rev. John W. O'Malley, S.J., Inauguration Speaker  The
deep goal of our proceedings this afternoon, I believe, is to bring all members
of the Holy Cross community to recollection
and, then, to celebration of what, in our best construction,
we are all about. I therefore quote the opening sentence
of the College's mission statement: "The College of the Holy
Cross is, by tradition and choice, a Jesuit liberal arts
college serving the Catholic community, American society,
and the wider world." From that sentence I single out
the word "tradition," and then I single out the word "serving" (helping),
for I think reflection upon them will help us accomplish
our goal.
Let's begin at the beginning. Why did Ignatius of Loyola and the first members
of the Society of Jesus decide to get involved in schooling in the first place?
As you know, in the 1530s after Ignatius gathered around himself 10 fellow
students at the University of Paris and led them to a deeper religious conversion
through his book of Spiritual Exercises, they determined they wanted
to be missionaries to the Holy Land. When that plan fell through, they decided
to stay together to found a new religious order. The basic impulse behind
the new order was thus missionary, an impulse that centuries later brought
Jesuits
to New England and led to the founding of our school.
From the Spiritual Exercises, however, the order had another important impulse,
and that was to interiority, that is, to reflection-and further, to heartfelt
acceptance of God's action in one's life. It was out of this impulse that
the Society of Jesus was born, and this impulse remains, it seems to me,
foundational
in the Jesuit tradition of education.
But, given these impulses, the question recurs: why did the Jesuits get involved
in education? There is another aspect of Ignatius of Loyola that we must
take into account that became ever more manifest in him as he moved to spiritual
maturity. We can call it his "reconciliation with the world." At the beginning
of his conversion at the castle of Loyola in 1521 and for some months later,
he gave himself over to severe fasting and other austerities. He let his
hair and fingernails grow, he dressed himself in rags. But as his spiritual
enlightenments
continued, he began to modify his behavior and then to change it altogether,
as he grew to love and see as gifts of God the things he earlier feared.
He changed from being a disheveled and repulsive-looking hermit to a man
who a
few years later determined to pursue his education at the most prestigious
academic institution of the day, the University of Paris. He was on his way
toward developing a world-friendly spirituality.
At Paris he studied the theology of Thomas Aquinas, in which he surely found
theoretical justification for this change, for reconciliation was the task
St. Thomas set himself-reconciliation of Aristotle and the Bible, that is,
of reason and revelation, that is, more broadly, of nature and grace, and even
more broadly of human culture and supernal religion. This beautiful vision
confirmed for Ignatius the insight dominating the last and culminating meditation
in his Spiritual Exercises, the meditation on the love of God. The conclusion
was clear: God could be found in all things of this world, sin alone excepted.
Ignatius therefore exhorted his fellow Jesuits to "find God in all things."
We must take into account yet another facet of Ignatius' development if we
are to answer our question. From the very beginning he described the task of
the Society of Jesus with the simple words "to help"-to serve. As he evolved
into his reconciliation with the world, he evolved to a believer in social
institutions and into seeing such institutions as in the long-run more
effective in "helping" and serving others than more individualistic means.
But the clinching reason why he directed the Society
into education was because he found in the liberal arts tradition of education
then achieving a rebirth
in the Renaissance a vision of life and learning consonant with his own.
The humanists of the Renaissance had revived the tradition of education that
originated
in fifth-century Athens and was transmitted to the Renaissance especially
through the works of ancient Roman authors like Cicero and Quintilian. It was
a tradition
of pagan origin, yet it spoke to Saint Ignatius and the other Jesuits.
Cicero had succinctly defined the goal of this style of education: to produce
vir bonus, dicendi peritus-a good person, skilled in leading others. "A good
person"-moral probity was at the heart of the system. The Jesuits, with a spirituality
of reconciliation with human culture, could grasp the significance of this
spiritual and ethical message coming from this statesman/philosopher who had
never heard of Christ. The scope of this humanistic style of education was
to prepare students to take their place as leaders in public life. The "ideal
graduates" were young adults who wanted to be active agents in political or
religious society to work for the "common good," an expression that recurs
time and again in Cicero and was enthusiastically adopted by the Jesuits.
What we are seeing, it seems to me, is a happy blending
of the Christian tradition of self-transcendence with the best secular thinking
available in the 16th
century.
The tradition of the College of the Holy Cross derives from the religious faith
and religious experience of the early Jesuits. Holy Cross is a Catholic college.
But the tradition also derives from the experience of the early Jesuits as
educators-indeed, as educators engaged with what we would call secular subjects.
Taking account of this latter source helps move the tradition beyond a narrow
confessional outlook to provide, if I may use the expression, common ground.
The vision underlying the heritage of Holy Cross is thus radically reconciliatory.
The spirituality of the Society of Jesus in its best and, in my opinion, most
authentic form wants therefore "to find God in all things." For a school "all
things" look especially to the products of human curiosity and questioning,
even when those products challenge received beliefs and seem expressly antipathetic
to them. To stay the course in a situation of such challenge requires magnanimity-fortitude
and greatness of soul in difficult undertakings.
For Holy Cross to achieve the best that its tradition
proposes is not therefore a project for the faint of heart. I have known Father
Michael McFarland for
over 20 years. He is not faint of heart. I join with all of you in wishing
him Godspeed in the task he has undertaken for us.
Fr. O'Malley is a professor of church history at the
Weston Jesuit School of Theology.
"A Glimpse of
Transcendence” by Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J. >
“The Glow of All that yet might be” by
Helen Whall, Speaker of the Faculty >
“The Gifts of Holy Cross” by Tarah
Auguste ’01 >
Back to "Rev.
Michael C. McFarland, S.J., inaugurated
as 31st president" Feature >
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