Commencement Address for Saint Jerome Institute Graduation

All this time reading closely, asking questions, arguing, studying, and writing: what was it all for?

June 1st, 2026 — Memorial of St. Justin the Martyr

I am told that “to graduate” is properly used of students in the passive voice, something done to the subject by an agent, namely, Saint Jerome Institute. Knowing you have been taught to value precision in thought: congratulations, you have been graduated.

But I have been asked to address your commencement. Commencing is used here in the active voice. You are not being commenced. What, then, are you commencing?

If there were a ship waiting outside this basilica, your next step would be obvious. I might say: remember, one hand for the ship, one for yourself; now, fair winds and following seas! But when you walk outside after this ceremony, you will see no ship.

What great new thing is beginning? True, something you have spent the last twelve or so years of your life doing—mandatory education—will have ended.

But if this were just a mile marker until your final chapter of school is done, you’d need a pep talk, not a commencement address: hang in there, guys, just a few more years!

But that doesn’t seem right. Something is ending. Maybe it’s your youth? Maybe we’re here to celebrate the commencement of your adulthood! But that can’t be entirely right either, as only those who are graduated from school—not all eighteen-year-olds—receive a commencement address.

Now, school has a purpose, a goal, and its end is not itself. The point is not to stay in school forever, to be perpetually graduated from one level of education after another. Its purpose is to prepare you to begin something greater.

The reason you spent all this time reading closely, asking questions, arguing, studying, and writing. What was it all for?

Knowing SJI, I expect you all could circle up right now and start a seminar to reason out exactly what you are supposed to commence. But, in the interest of time, allow me the indulgence of doing what you were not allowed to do: peek in the back of the book and look up the answer.

What has been achieved these last four years is learning. School is a tool for the sake of learning. You did not just study to acquire facts; you were taught how to reason, how to understand, and perhaps even how to find wisdom. In a word: to gain the power of intelligence.

An important clarification. I don’t mean intelligence in the sense of aptitude, like IQ. I mean it in the classical sense: an active power, what the Medieval schoolmen called a habitus, the virtue that makes you different from all other things in the material universe.

In celebrating this commencement, we do not mean your time of developing that virtue of intelligence is over. Rather, as most of you are now considered adults, we mark this graduation to symbolize the commencement of something already begun, embryonically.

We made you go to school so that, as you matured from childhood to adulthood and developed the power that distinguishes you as homo sapiens, you would learn to employ that power well, to seek and find what that power is for.

While so many are content merely to be graduated from school, you have found something far greater: something beautiful, thrilling, delightful. Something wonderful.

Intelligence without an object, an end, to contemplate and be thrilled by, is like teeth without something to bite. Pretty to look at, perhaps, but ultimately worthless.

While preparing this address, I noticed this on the Saint Jerome Institute website, under the title, “Why Study at SJI?”:

When we stand in the presence of a powerful sculpture or gaze through the eyepiece of a telescope and see a distant nebula, there is an extended moment of awe when we are transfixed with wonder. The desire to understand what we see, to know its story, prompts us to ask questions and seek answers. At SJI, we strive to recreate this moment, to ask these questions, and to know these stories in every subject we teach. From the epic tales of Odysseus and Beowulf, to the quiet heroism of Walter Ciszek in Soviet Russia, from the deceptive simplicity of counting, to the surprising complexity of the natural logarithm, SJI presents the inspiring beauty of our world in ways that lead students to deeper understanding and lifelong mastery.

What is it that you wanted to understand? For what inspiring beauty have you sought this deeper mastery?

I take it back: you can’t just look up this answer in the back of a book. It must be sought out, searched for, fought for, discovered. The source behind all the truth you contemplated, the exemplar of all the beauty you delighted in, the motive of all the goodness you shared in. The perfection of all perfections: l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle—the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

This great search, this quest, this adventure: this is what intelligence is for. All the things you learned—not the things some were merely told and had to memorize to repeat on a test, but the knowledge and understanding you struggled for as you developed that power yourselves—they were clues, signs pointing you toward the goal.

That is what you must commence, now: the most important task of all, one you have hopefully already begun, but now must begin again as we all must, as we come into possession of ourselves, as we grow up.

But I must stop here and add a word of caution.

You are commencing this journey amidst great peril. It may be that there has never been a time when the success of this work has been so much in doubt.

In the middle of the journey of our lives, we have found ourselves in a dark wood. The great search, the quest, the adventure, is being abandoned.

Students no longer read books. Papers are no longer written. Grades are given out not to reward genuine intellectual achievement, but for sounding smart, as incentives for professional advancement. More and more of human life is spent not listening, not thinking, not wondering, not understanding, but merely hearing, watching, passing the time, being entertained. And worst of all—so unlike your time these past four years—this time is not spent with others, but in isolation: distracted from distraction by distraction, alone.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Pope Leo XIV issued an encyclical called Magnifica Humanitas, on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

I encourage you all to read it.

My reading of it makes me think that the first task, the most important task today, is once again to ask the right questions, so to know and understand the difference between intelligence and artifice.

And so, by God’s Providence, the exceptional education you have received is most needed right now. You are needed, right now.

The crisis is erupting so quickly that it is difficult even to take stock of it. Soon, life around you will change so rapidly that it may seem all you did before this moment failed to prepare you for it. It may even be tempting to surrender all resistance, allowing the senescence of your hard-won virtue of intelligence.

But remember: an artifact, even the most sophisticated one, is just a tool, and only reflects the design and execution of its agent.

So it is not just critically, but heroically important, for all of us, right now, that you keep seeking that deeper understanding and lifelong mastery, asking the most important questions, even when everyone around you is tempted to stop asking and just keep building:

· To ask, not just how can we build it, but what is it for? What are we risking, what might be lost or gained? What are we seeking, why are we doing it?

· To ask, what is man, that we can do such things and ask such questions? Who am I, what am I looking for, what really satisfies? Who are we, and what do we owe to each other, together?

· To ask, are weakness and dependence and suffering simply evils to be overcome and eliminated, or can they be gifts to be received, opportunities to discover what is most beautiful in human life?

· To ask, who loves me, not just for what I can do but for who I am; whom do I love, not for what I can get, but for what I can give; and why is this love so different from anything else?

· To ask, who could make such a love in its image, who could guide and direct all this, who lies behind and before and beyond all my searching, who is calling me in these restless questions, and has He answered?