Graduation

Thursday afternoon 25 October 2007

I am very pleased to share this happy occasion with today’s graduates and with your families and friends. In this conferring ceremony your gifts, your work, your achievements are recognised by the University of Limerick and by all of us here in Mary Immaculate College. As I congratulate you who are graduating, I also share the joy of everyone who celebrates this day with you, whether they are present with us, or here in spirit. I want also to acknowledge with thanks and admiration the many ways in which so many people in this College, academic staff, administrative staff, and everyone who plays a part in the life of the College, have made their own contribution to your arrival at this moment. This is a day on which we celebrate and give thanks for the fruit of all of that support and expertise and professional commitment.

A gathering like this shows us that education, at whatever level, is not an impersonal activity, nor is it simply an interaction between a student and a teacher. Education is a community activity made possible only by the involvement of very many people, within the College and outside it. The second sentence of our Mission Statement opens with the words “The College community” and goes on to say that this community promotes excellence, that it fosters the growth of students in all the dimensions of their personal development and that it does so in a supportive and challenging environment.

It is vital that this should be the case, because the goal of education is not simply to provide qualifications and jobs and productive citizens. The first goal of education focuses on the student as a person. This is a real challenge for education today, not least at third level.

In the history of our Western European culture universities have played an honourable and vital part. But perhaps we need to reflect again on the fact that in their origins the universities of medieval Europe were first of all communities. The phrase universitas magistrorum et scholarium, from which the word, ‘university’ comes, means ‘the community of teachers and students’.

It is important that we value that inheritance and make every effort to avoid losing it in a world where, as Pope Benedict said last year to representatives of the Theology Faculty of his old university at Tubingen, “the modern University runs a considerable risk of becoming, as it were, a complex of advanced study institutes externally and institutionally united rather than being able to create the interior unity of the universitas”. I hope that in the years ahead we can continue to foster that sense of being a community, in the college, with the families and friends of the College, with the surrounding community and of course with the University of Limerick.

The risk of fragmentation does not exists only in university education. It exists in a society which has become so complex and fast moving that people often have the sense that they cannot keep up and that they are losing their bearings. If we are losing our bearings, it is not just because of the speed of change and the highly specialised nature of scientific and technological advances – which in many ways are a marvellous expression of the skill and knowledge of those who research them. The real problem is that we do not reflect on the big questions such as ‘Who are we?’ “What is the meaning of our lives?’, ‘How can life have meaning for those who live in cruel deprivation and oppression?” “What happens when we die?” These are questions that do not go away. If we do not even take time to ask them, how can we hope to have bearings for our lives?

This College is founded on a tradition which seeks the answer to those questions about our bearings in the words of the Psalm: The word of God is a light for my feet ( Ps 119:105 ). It is not an answer that gives rise to complacency or a sense of superiority but to a constant reflection and searching for the light. Today we rejoice in what the community of the College has given to you and what you have given to us. I hope that you will keep in touch. Our good wishes and prayers go with you.

Comhgáirdeas libh uile, go n-eirí bhúr mbóthar libh is go raibh Briathar Dé mar lóchrann agaibh.

+Donal Murray