John Garvey, President of The Catholic University of America 
Mass of the Holy Spirit Remarks 
Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Great Upper Church
Sept. 2, 2021

We begin each year by gathering here to ask for the blessing of the Holy Spirit.  It’s a chance to thank God for what the new semester holds. This year I am particularly grateful that we are here in person.  Last year many of our students missed the joy of living on campus. Professors had to reformat their teaching to suit social distancing and online learning.  It’s good to be together again. 

When the country locked down in the spring of 2020 we could see a silver lining or two. Some people enjoyed the convenience of working from home. Some had more time with their families. Some found an opportunity for reflection in solitude. But as time wore on we began to miss things: friendly faces on the Metro; the choir at Sunday mass; dinners together; nights out. These once seemed like small things. But when they were gone we realized they were big. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a convert to Catholicism, was received into the Church by John Henry Newman.  After he graduated from Oxford he joined the Jesuits (Pope Francis’s order).  In 1877 he wrote a sonnet (first published 40 years later) about how small things can be big.  “Glory be to God for dappled things” he wrote,

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
[for] finches’ wings . . . 

Everyday we experience beauty in real things. Today we feel it in the vastness of this basilica, with its marble columns and brilliant mosaics.  If you go to the crypt you can see it in the quiet simplicity of the Lourdes Chapel.  

We hear it in the hymn we sang in the procession, John Dryden’s version of Veni Creator Spiritus: “Come visit every pious mind; come pour thy joys on humankind.” The music itself is a source of our joy. 

Like Hopkins, we also see beauty in ordinary things: the crepe myrtles on the campus; the smell of cut grass; the smile of a friend. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” Hopkins says in another poem. It’s everywhere if you look for it.  But it’s harder to access on Zoom. 

Today we begin another semester at Catholic University, this time together in person. My advice to you is this: Cherish the real things. Find the beauty in them. Trace the details on the façade of Gibbons Hall.  Sit a while in Caldwell and look around.  Enjoy our green spaces – the atrium of Ward, the Mary Garden; in another month, the reflecting pool we are building for Angels Unawares.   

The beauty around you will nourish your soul. It will make you happy. More than that, it will bring you closer to God.  Hopkins understood that too. The poem ends like this:

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
Whatever is fickle, freckled . . .
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 
Praise him.

Beauty in all its forms shows something of God to us.  It points us past the here and now to something we desire deep down.  It invites us to join in its chorus of praise to the one who makes everything that is beautiful.  Pope Francis says it plainly in Evangelii Gaudium: “Every expression of true beauty . . . [is] a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus.” 

I hope you’ll spend time on that path this semester.  God bless you and all your efforts.