Remarks of Attorney
General John Ashcroft
Commencement Address for The
Catholic University of America
Washington D.C.
Your Eminence, Cardinal McCarrick;
Very Reverend President, Father O’Connell; trustees; members of the
administration, faculty and staff; distinguished guests; parents and families
of the graduates; and members of the class of 2002:
I am overwhelmed with the honor of
joining you as an honorary graduate of this institution. It almost prompts me
to cut the length of my speech.
Seriously, I am grateful
to you, Father O’Connell, for your kind invitation to deliver this year’s
commencement address at The Catholic University of America. I am privileged, not only to be making the
address, but also to be joining the ranks of those who have learned here, to
join their ranks as an honorary member, thanks to the degree you have conferred
upon me.
It is customary, on
occasions such as this, for the speaker to congratulate the graduates on what
they have achieved — and let me be the first to do so. But let me also remind you, on this day so
near to Mother’s Day, that your achievement is not yours alone. You share this day with — and they deserve our
thanks – those people behind you, people who have been behind you for years —
the parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters who have supported you; the
faculty and staff who have guided you; and, last but not least, the friend who
got you through Religion 201.
The Catholic writer, G.K Chesterton,
defined education – and I’m quoting now – as "the soul of a society as it
passes from one generation to another."
But Chesterton cautioned that we must first possess this societal soul –
this common understanding of the virtues we value and the freedoms we cherish –
we must possess it before we can pass it on. As he put it, and I’m quoting
again, "We cannot give what we
have not got," Chesterton said, and I’m quoting further, "and we
cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves."
Today is a day worthy of celebration
because today you begin your lives as the builders of our culture, the shapers
of our institutions – the leaders, teachers and mentors of your fellow
Americans. You begin this life journey
as the heirs to the great tradition of scholarship informed and nurtured by the
Catholic faith. Each of you, regardless
of your personal faith, is today the recipient of a great gift – the gift of an
education in human reason guided by the light of eternal truth.
In his extraordinary constitution on
Catholic universities, His Holiness Pope John Paul II described the experience
of Catholic education as "an ardent search for truth and its unselfish
transmission to youth and to all those learning to think rigorously." The goal of this search for truth, the Pope
wrote, is "to act rightly, to act rightly and to serve humanity
better."
For 115 years, the university from which you
graduate today, The Catholic University of America, has guided young people in
this search for truth. You are soon to
join a long line of distinguished alumni of this and other Catholic
institutions. Monsignor George Higgins,
a graduate of Catholic who passed away just a few days ago, devoted his life to
the pursuit of social justice. I have
the privilege of working with Dr. Condoleezza Rice, the President’s National
Security Advisor. She attended Notre Dame University. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are
graduates of Georgetown and Holy Cross Universities. All of these men and women and many more graduates of Catholic
institutions have, in the spirit of Chesterton, shaped the soul of our society,
moulded the contours of this great culture, and passed it along, passed the
culture along – better and more complete – to new generations of Americans.
They have understood as all eventually
learn that the greatest responsibility of
a society is the transmission of
values from one generation to the next.
Across the country, at over 230 Catholic
colleges and universities, hundreds of thousands of young Americans of many
different faiths join in this heritage and receive this great gift. Two and a half million children in Catholic
elementary and secondary schools – rich
children, poor children, black children, white children, Catholic
children, non-Catholic children – God’s
children – are also a part of this great tradition, part of this rich
opportunity, this important gift. These children have been given a gift – the
gift of high achievement born of high expectations, and high achievement and
high expectations are partners in the process of producing the best that
mankind can enjoy. They’re also the recipients of the gift of dignity born of
unconditional love.
The tradition you inherit is not confined
within the walls of Catholic institutions.
It has formed and shaped principles that resonate far beyond the
Catholic Church and the faithful – these are the universal principles, truths,
about the nature of life, the essentiality of truth and the unique gift of
human freedom.
Today, we are a nation called to a better
understanding of these ideas — a deeper comprehension than that which is
conveyed by our popular culture and even many of our academic
institutions. The values we hold —
truth, human dignity, freedom – these are the values that are under assault in
the world. And in the midst of this
assault, we have learned that our values are neither self-executing nor self-sustaining. They must be defended, not just with
military might, but with deeper devotion.
To
defeat a culture of death, we must cultivate a culture of life.
To
expose the great lie of nothingness, we must embrace the great truth of being.
Above
all, to conquer tyranny, we must understand the nature and source of our
freedom.
We come together today at this great
university — The Catholic University of America – we as people of many beliefs
united in a single conviction: we come
together, understanding that people of
faith find the source of freedom and human dignity in the Creator. People of all religions are called to the
defense of His creation.
As God's gift, freedom is not license to behave in
any way we choose. It is the gift of consequence
– the fact that when we act we have impact. The ability to make choices with
the understanding that what we choose has consequence. Our freedom is the
freedom to choose good or evil — it is not freedom to make choices that have no
consequence. Our choices will have
consequence for good or evil. Our opportunity is to make those choices well.
For those who embrace a biblical
understanding of creation, the difference between freedom and license echoes
down the corridors of time in two voices, both first heard in the Garden of
Eden.
The first voice, the voice of evil, was a
voice disguised as the voice of freedom, and it whispered: "Just do it, it
won't make a difference." The
second voice, the voice of God, states plainly: make your choices but make them
carefully because you make all the difference.
The voice of evil, posing as freedom,
tells us that we are free to ignore the difference between good and evil,
between life and death. It says, Go ahead; it won’t make a difference. The
consequence isn’t as promised. But let me just say that when we are told that
our choices are without consequences, we are not told that we are free, because
without consequence, we are without meaning. So the voice which tells us that
we have no consequence doesn’t describe freedom. It describes meaninglessness.
Each of us wants to have meaning. Each of us embraces the fact that we choose
with consequence and that those items in our portfolio that we bring to our
culture and to the people and population with which we live, those potentials
describe our capacity to shape that culture positively. The greatest virtue of
true freedom is that our choices have consequence.
Now the terrorist has a distrust of
freedom. Terrorists distrust the decisions of free people, afraid of what free
people would choose. Instead, the terrorist’s rejection of persuasion leads
them to rely on extortion to force people to a conclusion that they would never
embrace on their own. And instead of hope and reason, terrorists offer
fear. For those who seek truth and
think rigorously, the way of the terrorist offers nothing. In a universe of choices – in a marketplace
of ideas – the terrorist defames the concept of choice, embraces the idea of
force and rejects the idea that truth prevails over distortion.
It is the deeper understanding of freedom
as the inborn hope of humanity that is part of the heritage that passes to you
today. It is a heritage which teaches
us that freedom is not the grant of any government, any prince, or any king but
is, in fact, our gift from God.
It is a heritage that shaped the great
founding idea of America, the idea expressed in these words, which we learned
years ago:
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness.
For over two centuries, American leaders
of every party and every faith have echoed this idea. Abraham Lincoln spoke of a nation "conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." John F.
Kennedy declared that the rights of man come not "from the generosity of
the state, but from the hand of God."
And our president George W. Bush began his presidency by reminding
Americans that we are not alone in the struggle for freedom, that an angel
rides in the whirlwind, directing the storm that engulfs humanity.
There are those who believe that to acknowledge
the Creator as the source of freedom is to diminish our freedom. But I believe they misinterpret, they
invert, and they turn around that which is right. We acknowledged God as the
author of our freedom and when we have, we affirm the dignity and worth of
every human being. We are blessed to
live in a nation that protects the rights of all precisely because we
acknowledge that we are not the grantors of these rights, that God grants
rights – we seek to guard them and guarantee them, but they are of a source
greater than our own.
Two days ago, I managed to get through my
60th birthday and began the seventh decade of my life. I have now lived long enough to know that
nothing is more important in life than friendship. And if you will indulge me, I would like to conclude my remarks
by saying a few words about a most important friendship: the friendship and mutual reinforcement of
the enduring bond between learning and freedom.
Like all great
friendships, the relationship between learning and liberty is mutually
enriching. We are free because our
actions have consequences. We have
meaning when we make choices. If we had no meaning we would not be free; we
would be meaningless. And education gives meaning and value to our freedom. It
helps us to understand by our mistakes what to avoid doing again, and it helps
us to understand by witnessing the successes of those around us so we can learn
from those successes, so we can move toward greater success in ourselves.
And just as education enriches freedom,
it confers responsibility. As graduates
of this great Catholic institution, your obligations do not end with this day
but have only just begun. The legacy
you inherit is now the hope of future generations, so hold it high, and bare it
proudly. Seek truth. Think rigorously. Act rightly. Serve
humanity. And know that in a world of
freedom, there is no doubt that you will prevail.
Congratulations, graduates. God bless you, and God bless America.
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