Bishop Robert Barron Shares “the Pearl of Great Price” in 2025 Commencement Address

Bishop Robert Barron, bishop of the Diocese of Winona–Rochester and founder of Word on Fire, delivered the 2025 University Commencement address on Saturday, May 17. The text of his remarks follows immediately below.

President Kilpatrick, fellow members of the Catholic University Board of Trustees, dear faculty and students, thank you for the great honor you have bestowed on me today.  May I say as I begin, that it is wonderful that this is the first Catholic University graduation to take place during the Papacy of Leo XIV, who took his papal name in tribute to Leo XIII, the Pope who presided over the establishment of this great institution.  To Pope Leo, ad multos annos!

Fellow graduates of the Class of 2025, I sat exactly where you are sitting forty-three years ago.  I know it’s a cliché to say it, but it seems like six months ago.  It was a bright, sunny day, and the commencement speaker was Frank Reynolds.  Most of you probably don’t remember him, but he was the anchorman for the national ABC news, a very well-known personality at the time.  I will confess to recalling not a word of what he said, but I remember the moment, very well.  It felt joyful, exciting, full of future promise.  I hope all of you feel that way today.  I want to offer, of course, a word of very sincere congratulation to my fellow graduates, but I also want to thank with all my heart your parents, friends, teachers, and mentors who have brought you to this day of celebration. God bless all of you.

My years at Catholic University, where I studied philosophy, corresponded to some extraordinary events in the wider world. Ronald Reagan was elected president during my time here, and I had the opportunity to attend his inauguration on an unusually beautiful January day.  The Iranian hostages were released around that time, and I took part in the celebration on the Mall.  Just a few months after his inauguration, and as I was preparing for my comprehensive exams, the president was shot, and Pope John Paul II was nearly assassinated just a few months later.  But while all of this upheaval and excitement was proceeding in the outside world, I was largely preoccupied with my studies, which amounted to an opening up of a higher world.  For I was a student of philosophy. Plato speaks of the escape from the cave, which is to say, from the world of ordinary experience, in order to find a world of mathematical and philosophical truth, a dimension of reality that does not change and that brings us closer to God.  

Philosophy, in imitation of Plato, has inquired into questions such as the nature of the good life, the ultimate origin of all things, the meaning of truth, the nature of justice.  These are, in themselves, perfectly useless questions and those who entertain them are useless persons.  I mean both of these as a compliment.  One of the most important truths I learned from Aristotle—and I learned it here—is that the liberal arts, which is to say, those that are liberi, free from practicality, are higher than the practical arts, for they are focused on things that are good in themselves.  So, knowing how to fix a car is a useful art—and a most important one—for it is subordinated to the good of driving the car; and surgery is a useful art, for it is subordinated to the good of the health of the body.  Politics is a useful study, but it is in service of something higher, namely, justice.  Why do we drive cars at all and what do we do with our healthy bodies?  Why should we choose this candidate or that?  Neither mechanics nor biology nor political science can answer those questions.  They can be answered only by the useless study, which enquires into issues of truth, goodness, and beauty.  I consider my years of philosophical study here, under a series of masters, one of the great privileges of my life.  The wonderfully useless years that I spent here set the tone for the rest of my life and career.  

I know that the vast majority of you did not major in philosophy or theology, but I also know that the spirit of these two disciplines pervades this place.  Catholic University is not a place where the practical sciences alone are explored. Rather, in all of the disciplines, the searching out of the nature of the good life is of paramount importance.  There is much we could say about this.  The good life involves real friendship, the cultivation of the life of the mind, a savoring of beautiful things, falling deeply in love, finding satisfying work, etc.  But at the heart of the good life, my young brothers and sisters, is a relationship with the living God, who is properly called the highest good, the summum bonum. 

All of the values I just mentioned are good but not in an unqualified sense. This means that they cannot, even in principle, satisfy the deepest longing of the human heart, which is for not simply beautiful things, but beauty itself, not simply morally upright acts, but goodness itself, not simply for knowledge of particular truths, but Truth itself.  As C.S. Lewis pointed out, the longing for God becomes most vividly true, not when we suffer and fall short, but precisely when we have achieved some great worldly excellence.  At those moments of most intense satisfaction, we know, paradoxically, that nothing in this world satisfies us. 

Here's my message to all the graduates: Do not ignore this holy longing that resonates in your hearts!  I know that there is a secularist ideology that has worked its way into the minds of many and into our institutions.  It is a poison to the soul.  When we live within the stuffy confines of what philosopher Charles Taylor calls “the buffered self,” which is to say, the self which is cut off from connection with the transcendent, we dry up.  We might become rich, famous, powerful, and widely loved, but we will not be happy apart from an orientation to the highest good.  As St. Augustine, the great spiritual father of our new pope, put it long ago, “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and therefore our heart is restless till it rests in you.” 

Why are numbers measuring anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation spiking among your peers?  There are undoubtedly many reasons we could give, but I would suggest that first among them is the loss of contact with God and the things of God.  To be told that there is no creative source of your existence, no objective moral values, no ultimate purpose to life, and no transcendent home produces, unsurprisingly, a sort of metaphysical depression.  I understand that the atheists and agnostics have planted in the mind of many a suspicion of God, a keen sense that God threatens our freedom and flourishing.  The more we surrender to God, the less alive we are.  So wouldn’t it be better to wriggle free of the divine oppression?  The answer to this must be an emphatic no! 

My greatest teacher when I was a student at Catholic University was Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, and Msgr.’s master idea, reiterated in numerous of his articles and books, is the non-competitive transcendence of God.  The most basic claim of the Christian faith is that God became one of us, without ceasing to be God and without compromising the integrity of the humanity that he assumed.  Precisely because God is not a being in the world, not one reality among many, he can assume a human nature without doing violence to it.  How different this is, Msgr. Sokolowski often observed, from the ancient myths which show divinities entering into the world aggressively, destructively. 

Our secular culture is haunted by the idea of a threatening God only in the measure that it has lapsed into forgetfulness of Christianity.  St. Irenaeus of Lyon, in the second century, expressed the master idea with admirable clarity:  gloria Dei homo vivens, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.”  The true God wants our flourishing and at every level.  God desires that we glorify him precisely by our artistic achievements, our business acumen, our moral excellence, the just exercise of our political instincts.  In biblical language, he invites us to eat of all the trees of the garden save one. The Lord doesn’t want us to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, not because he’s opposed to our intellectual curiosity, but because he doesn’t want us to arrogate to ourselves the prerogative that belongs uniquely to him, becoming ourselves the criterion of good and evil. 

So what precisely does it mean to surrender to God, to accept God as the supreme good of your life?  In the first letter of St. John, we find the following distinctively Christian and still startling characterization:  “God is love.”  The sacred author is not saying that God loves or that love is one of God’s many attributes; rather, he is saying that love is what God is, that love is the very nature of God.  But what is love?  Thomas Aquinas says, with typical economy of expression, that love is “willing the good of the other.”  Therefore, to make God absolutely central in your life is to conform your life to love: what you have received as a gift, you must give as a gift.  And, my young friends, here is a bit of high octane spiritual physics:  when you give away what you have received, you find the grace increasing in you, not diminishing.  St. Pope John Paul II formulated this as a spiritual law, namely, that your being increases in the measure that you give it away. Counter-intuitive?  Yes.  Opposed to almost everything you hear in the culture today?  Yes.  But trust me when I tell you it is the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field, the great Secret, the Kingdom of God. 

Might I make a suggestion to all of you?  Please God, you will all become persons of great accomplishment in the world: lawyers, physicians, captains of industry, investors, entertainers, writers, political leaders, good parents, etc. But above all of that, through all of that, contrive a way to make your life a gift.  Do not endeavor to fill up your ego; rather, endeavor to make it a conduit of grace.  In the course of my ministry on the internet, I will come across, with some regularity, a commenter who tells me that his life has bottomed out, that he is in the deepest depression, and that he is seeking my advice.  This is what I say:  perform, every day, the simplest act of love, willing the good of the other.  That’s my recommendation to all of you, for every moment of your lives, at your times of greatest triumph, at your times of greatest failure and depression—and trust me, you will experience both the high and the low: love. When you do this, you are not simply being a “nice person;” you are linking yourself to the deepest source of reality and truth and joy. 

Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, the legendary President of the University of Notre Dame from 1952 to 1987, received his doctorate in theology from Catholic University in 1945.  Over and again, throughout his career as teacher and administrator, he would repeat this mantra:  the prayer that is appropriate at every moment of your life, the prayer that the Lord will never cease to respond to is “Veni, Sancte Spiritus.”  (Come, Holy Spirit).  Hesburgh would say, “pray it when you are most successful and when you fail; pray it on your best days and on your worst days; pray it in season and out.” Who is the Holy Spirit but the love that connects the Father and the Son, the love that God is. Another famous graduate of this institution—he received his Master’s degree in philosophy here in 1966—was my mentor, Francis Cardinal George of Chicago.  One of his most famous adages was this:  “the only things you will take into heaven with you are those things that you gave away on earth.”  Both Fr. Hesburgh and Cardinal George were making the same point that I am today: conform your life as fully as you can to love and you will find the joy and the heaven that you seek. 

Who knows?  Maybe one of you, forty-three years from now, will be standing where I’m standing, delivering the commencement address.  Will you remember much of what I said today?  Probably as well as I remember Frank Reynold’s words.  But would it be too bold to ask that you recall the words of yet another graduate of Catholic University, Mother Teresa of Kolkata, who received an honorary degree here in 1971?  Her words sum up everything I’ve been endeavoring to communicate: “don’t worry inordinately about doing great things; do even the littlest things with great love.”  

So congratulations to the Class of 2025, and God bless you all.