With final exams drawing to a close tomorrow, the campus is getting quieter, the residence halls are emptying out, and the first half of the academic year is over.

Almost.

On Saturday, Saint Vincent will have another important celebration – December Commencement exercises. The group receiving their diplomas is so large that we are holding the ceremony in the Basilica in order to accommodate the huge crowd that will fill every pew and available chair.

By the numbers, there will be 59 bachelor degrees awarded and 71 men and women will receive their master degree, the latter the most at any Saint Vincent commencement, fall or spring. This increase in master degrees primarily owes to the large cohort of individuals – 32 in all – receiving their Master of Science in Nurse Anesthesia.

It is fitting in the year when we celebrate the 25th anniversary of coeducation at Saint Vincent College that female graduates would be prevalent in both the Nurse Anesthesia program and in this graduating class overall.

Appropriately enough, a woman will ascend to the pulpit in the Basilica and address our graduates, their families and guests, and the Saint Vincent College community.

Cecilia Dickson, who graduated from Saint Vincent in 1999 with highest honors, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science with a minor in history, has agreed to join us as our speaker. After she left Saint Vincent she continued her education at Harvard Law School and was a star there, competing on the Harvard Law School Mock Trial Team and winning both the 2002 regional and national championships in the Association of Trial Lawyers of America Student Trial Advocacy Competition.

In her spare time she was supervising editor of the Harvard Journal on Legislation and she also published pieces in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. She now is a prominent attorney in Pittsburgh at the prestigious Jones Day law firm – and she is so young! Cecilia is a Latrobe native and continues to contribute to Saint Vincent as an adjunct professor in the McKenna School – she will be teaching next semester. I am looking forward to her remarks.

And on today, the 90th anniversary of the birth of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I am reminded of one of the greatest commencement addresses ever delivered. Thirty years ago he spoke in a driving rain at Harvard and delivered what many characterized as a prophetic speech (that was punctuated by cracks of lightning and peals of thunder, no less). I recall seeing clips of the speech and then following the controversy that his assessment of America’s spiritual exhaustion and the Western media’s excesses precipitated. Over the years I frequently have read it in its entirety and it has held up over time quite well.

So as we prepare to hear a commencement address tomorrow, I close this blog with some excerpts from the speech of this remarkable man of God who died in August. His speech at Harvard, like his many literary works, surely will inspire future generations – and future commencement speakers.

Have a blessed and holy Christmas, dear Saint Vincent students. I already miss you. See you in a month – except for the ones I will see Saturday!

“Today’s Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints. It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power, and it has in fact been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example, against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

…This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man – the master of this world – does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society.

…The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.)

…Hastiness and superficiality – these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Yet one would like to ask: According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?

…I am not examining here the case of a world-war disaster and the changes it would produce in society. As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, that has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

Of such consciousness man is the touchstone, in judging everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.

…We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.

…If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully to get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty, so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it.”