A Call to Action

Sr. Ann, members of the Board of trustees, distinguished Faculty and Staff, proud and relieved Parents and Grandparents, dutiful but bored Siblings, Friendss, and most importantly, Glorious Graduates, members of the Class of 2007. Congratulations! The day you thought would never come has finally arrived – and what a beautiful day it is!

Thank you for your warm welcome, and for inviting me to be a part of this special occasion.

When Sister Ann graciously extended the invitation to me to be here today, I began to think about what I could say that would be profound enough to send you into the future energized and perhaps even moved. For inspiration, I thought back to my own graduation from this very school nearly four decades ago, and to my dismay, I realized that I did not remember a single word that was said that day! Not only that, I couldn’t even remember who it was who said those words that I could not remember! That realization, while somewhat unsettling, was also strangely liberating since I now know that you are not likely to remember a single word I say, either – at least not for very long!
It also made me realize the truth in what former Governor Mario Cuomo once said about commencement speakers: They are like the body at an old-fashioned Irish wake. They are needed so that we can have a party, but no one really expects them to say very much.

And so, with that high standard in mind, let me say…..

Members of the Class of 2007, you are graduating at an extraordinary time. When I graduated from Notre Dame Academy, men made decision. Women made the coffee.
Things are different now.

Women hold leadership positions in virtually every walk of life you can name. In education, for example, when Drew Gilpin Faust becomes the first woman President of Harvard later this month, 4 of the 8 Ivy League Presidents will be women. The President of MIT, Susan Hockfield, is a renowned neuroscientist who just happens to be a woman. Overall, the number of colleges headed by women in this country now approaches I in 4, compared to 1986 when only 1 in 10 was led by a woman.

In business, 10 of the Fortune 500 companies are now led by women, including Xerox, the New York Times, EBay and Lucent Technologies. Even in the most masculine of career, women have made important inroads. More than 50 woman General and Admirals now proudly serve in our nation’s military service.

In politics, women have claimed seats at the table in numbers that our grandmothers could only have dreamed of. Currently, 16 of our 100 United States Senators are women. Historically, only 35 out of the 1895 citizens who have served in the Senate have been women since the first one, Rebecca Latimer Felton, served but for a single day in 1922. So even though 16 might not seem like many, it is nearly half of our historic total, and that trend is sure to accelerate.

For the first time in history, the Speaker of the House of Representatives is a woman, and there is a good chance that in January of 2009 she will be introducing our first woman President to Congress. Imagine that – only 89 years after the first American woman was finally allowed to cast a vote!

You get the picture. Thee sky, quite literally, is the limit. Today, women might still be making the coffee, but they are also making many of the decisions. The glass ceiling has been cracked by the generations of women who have preceded you. It is up to you to finish the job, and to shatter it once and for all.

We look forward to a world where the gender of a leader or an officeholder is no more noteworthy that her height or her eye color or birth order.

And you, graduates of Notre Dame Academy, are going to help create that world. You have been blessed with the great gift of a Notre Dame education. You are ready to take on any challenge – not in spite of your womanhood, but because of it.

You will do great things!

But my message to you today is that you must also do good things. Yes, personal accomplishment is important. Indeed, for you who have been given so much, it is an obligation. You must continue to develop your gifts, just like those servants in the Gospel of Matthew whose master gave them talents to multiply in his absence.

But is personal achievement an end in itself? Is it enough? The answer is a resounding “No”. It is not.

It is not enough in a country where nearly 40 million Americans are living below the poverty line – and tens of millions more struggle every day just to get by. It is not enough in a country where 1 out of every 5 children grows up in poverty, and most of them will never escape it.

Poverty has sharply increased in this country in the last six years, as approximately one million additional people have slipped below the poverty line each year. Do you know that even though America is the richest country in the world, we currently lag behind 23 other developed countries in the percentage of our citizens who now live in poverty? According to the latest statistics released, we barely edge out Mexico in this regard.

At the same time that poverty has been increasing in this country, so has economic inequality. In America, which was founded on the premise that “all men are created equal,” less than 1% of the population currently gets nearly 20% of the country’s income, and the bottom 20% of the people have to share less that 3 ½% of it

I say to you, these statistics are not just un-American. They are immoral. They are statistics that no one who honors the ideals upon which this great country was founded should accept. They are statistics that no one who strives to live the gospel of Christ should tolerate.

The American Bishops recognized this in their Pastoral letter on Economic Justice in 1986 when they wrote that bit is wrong to think of religion merely as “the fulfillment of acts of worship and the observance of a few moral obligations.” Rather, they continued, “the life and word of Jesus and the teachings of his Church call us to serve those in need and to work actively for social and economic justice.”

To be a good Catholic and a good American, therefore, is to answer that call to social and political activism. You must reach beyond your own comfort zone to work on behalf of “the least among us.” You must work to change public policies that allow people to live in destitution in this land of tremendous wealth, not only at the expense of their well-being but also of their dignity.

Work within the system, but where necessary, challenge the system. Challenge it until it is truly reflective of the ideals of our Founding Fathers, and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

If this sounds like atall order, it is. But you can do it!

As the legendary (woman!) anthropologist Margaret mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

The Dalai Lama put it another way when he observed, “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”

Class of 2007, go out and shake things up. Be that mosquito. You are smart. You are powerful. You can make a difference….and you must

Congratulations. I honor you for all you have accomplished and for all you have yet to do.