Your Excellency, Bishops, Rector, members of the Board, faculty, families,
Graduates of Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary—
I should begin with honesty.
I dislike commencement speeches. Honestly, I despise them.
Not the commencement. Not the granting of degrees. The commencement speech. The genre itself.
Commencement speeches usually fall into two categories:
The first is inspirational optimism delivered with the confidence of someone who thinks “financial hardship” means the oat milk costs extra. “Believe in yourself. Be the change you wish to see. Find your tribe. Be authentically you.” They sound profound until you realize they are stamped on a scented candle from Walmart.
The second category is more dangerous. Apparently, after years of studying Scripture, theology, philosophy, languages, history, and the full intellectual tradition of the Church — under excellent professors — what you really lacked was twenty minutes of my personal life advice.
Which is why we should probably draw from St Paul instead of me.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, he tells a community full of educated Greeks, people who valued rhetoric, philosophy, and the prestige of wisdom, that he came to them not with “lofty speech or wisdom.” He came, he says, “in weakness and fear and much trembling.” His entire argument was Christ crucified. The Greeks had a word for it: moria. Foolishness. They meant it as an insult.
Paul accepted the insult and turned it on its head. “The foolishness of God,” he wrote, “is wiser than human wisdom.” Paul is not playing humble. He is picking a fight. Paul informs us that the wisdom that wins arguments — the wisdom that sounds impressive on podcasts, that can win an online comment section, that even has better “your mama” jokes — is not the same as the wisdom that saves.
In Ephesians, Paul answers a question every seminary eventually has to answer: what are educated, formed, equipped people actually for? Paul tells us Christ gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, “to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry.”
He does not say the clergy are given to do all the ministry themselves while everyone else watches from folding chairs holding donut holes and lukewarm coffee after Mass. He does not say priests are called to become sacramental vending machines. The laity are not meant to outsource holiness to Father.
He does not say the educated are supposed to collect degrees the way some people collect merit badges, as though someday St. Peter will ask whether you completed the Certified Transformational Leader program.
No. Christ gives pastors, deacons, and teachers to equip the faithful for their work.
Their work.
Clericalism is one of the more quietly destructive mistakes in the modern Church. Usually, people reduce clericalism to a priest being arrogant or controlling. Certainly, it can include that. But clericalism is deeper than personalities.
It is the mistaken belief that the mission of the Church belongs primarily to the clergy.
It does not.
The priest is called to sanctify, teach, and shepherd, so that the people of God can live out their baptismal call.
The priest teaches so families can become domestic churches. The priest forms disciples so Catholics can go into workplaces, neighborhoods, hospitals, businesses, politics, and the rest — the whole beautiful mess of ordinary life — and bring Christ into it. Frankly, if a parish collapses because Father took one day off, that is not a sign of healthy ministry. That is a sign that Father hasn’t built a parish. He’s built a hostage situation.
The danger of clericalism is not restricted to priests but to all who function in ministry. A lay catechist can hoard the faith just as efficiently. A Catholic professor can build a following instead of forming disciples. A theologian can become a brand. A youth minister can make the parish revolve around their personality and call it evangelization. The danger is not the Roman collar. The danger is making yourself the destination.
Your degrees are given so you can equip the person next to you and then get out of the way. The university you walk into Monday morning, the hospital, the law firm, the kitchen table where your children ask hard questions — that is not the place you go after church. That is the church going somewhere. And the moment people start needing you more than they need Christ, you have failed the same way the worst priest fails. Quieter. Better dressed. Same failure.
The academic honors being celebrated here are meant to enable others to live out their baptismal call. What you have received in these classrooms is meant to be broken open and shared as bread for a starving world.
If not, the Church starts to function less like a mission and more like a religious service provider.
When priests, deacons, and teachers, consciously or unconsciously, encourage dependence upon themselves, the Church becomes spiritually bottlenecked. Baptized Catholics, anointed priest, prophet, and king, commissioned for the mission of sanctifying the world, sit passively, waiting to be served. It produces a consumerist model of faith: ‘I am owed this’ instead of ‘Here I am, Lord.’ The word Paul uses for “equip”, katartismos, was used for setting broken bones and mending fishing nets. Preparing something for the work it was made to do. The priest, deacon, or teacher who doesn’t equip the laity hasn’t just missed an opportunity. They have left the net abandoned on the shore.
Paul offers a pattern far more powerful: he prepares God’s people for the work they were made to do. Though brilliant and highly educated, he spent his life equipping others — forming Timothy, strengthening young churches, writing letters so the faith would endure without him. His goal was never to be indispensable. It was to make the Gospel indispensable.
The Church needs people whose learning has become wisdom. Worldly wisdom impresses the room. The wisdom from the cross changes it. It goes home with people.
In our world, people are drowning in content while starving for meaning. We have somehow created a civilization capable of explaining quantum physics on YouTube while remaining incapable of explaining why nobody is happy. We live in a civilization where people document lunch, workouts, and airport delays for strangers online, yet increasingly struggle to explain why their own lives matter. Where people can tell you their pronouns, attachment style, Hogwarts house, daily macros, and coffee order, yet still have no idea who they are.
A world that mistakes information for wisdom, cleverness for truth, and influence for mission is a world that will eventually be surrounded by everything it built and remain empty. The world is drowning in the candle gospel, in throw pillow truisms: Live, laugh, love; Manifest your truth; Be the energy you want to attract. None of it has ever saved a single soul, and none of it ever will.
Into that world, the Church sends you.
Not merely with diplomas. With responsibility.
Responsibility to teach. To form. To awaken the baptized to what baptism actually means. To take what you received in these classrooms and make it fruitful for people who are starving for something they are unable to name.
I told you at the start that I dislike commencement speeches. I stand by that.
I think I figured out why commencement addresses fail. They make the day about the speaker, or the graduate, or some vague bright future nobody can quite picture.
Paul’s vision is different. The day isn’t about you. It’s not about “doing your best,” “finding your passion,” “gifting the world your authentic self.”
It’s about the people you haven’t met yet. The person in the pew who doesn’t know what they believe. The student who’s about to lose their faith in a lecture hall. The family that’s barely holding together. The colleague who’s looking for something real and doesn’t know where to look. Most of the people you serve will never know Greek, never read Aquinas, never care about your degree. But they will know whether Christ became more believable because they met you.
They are why you went to school.
They are why you wrestled with Greek verbs and Aquinas at midnight.
They are why these degrees matter.
Offer them not just yourself, but Christ crucified. The only Wisdom that saves.
Send them into the world as living witnesses so that Christ, who is foolishness to the wise, becomes known. Your calling is to raise up a people who will sanctify the world, not by being impressive, but by being faithful. Not consumers of scented-candle wisdom, but disciples. Not spectators, but saints.
The Joy of the Gospel 