A Transcript of the Commencement Address of Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa) at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia, on May 17, 2003. He was awarded the College's Pro Deo et Patria Medal for Distinguished Service to God and Country.

C-SPAN was on campus for the Commencement Address and videotaped it.
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Thank you for this wonderful award and very gracious support of me and my work.

First and foremost, congratulations to the graduates, congratulations to Moms and Dads for your guidance, for your love and support of your children. Congratulations to friends and family here today who are a support for these graduates. Also, congratulations to Christendom College for providing an atmosphere where students can seek knowledge and purpose.

Commencement means beginning. You are beginning a great engagement: one between the life of the mind and the life of activity. And after today, you will put all of the ideas that you have been wrestling with here at Christendom into action. The world will be a different place because of it. Hopefully, a better place.

I hope this ceremony does not mark an end to your education. I hope that you will continue to work, the work of understanding the world and man's place in it, as well as the work of understanding history and your generation's place in it.

Christendom College has provided you better than, frankly, countless other universities in the United States, a genuine foundation, one based on objective truth but it will now be up to you to build on that foundation through your continued commitment to your faith wherever that path may lead you.

Joseph Pieper famously observed that leisure is the basis of culture. And the Greek word for "leisure" remarkably enough is "scholê," school. Now I know for the past four years you do not believe that you have been living a life of leisure, as you crammed for tests and pulled all-nighters. But that is exactly what you've had. You've had school as leisure time. You will now have to make time for reading. You will have to make time for thinking, reflection, and most of all, for prayer. You will have to take personal responsibility for the continued nurturing of your mind.

The greatest men and women of Western Tradition all agree that if you do not set time aside for contemplation, if you simply get caught up in the rat race of hectic life here in America, you will be of no use to anyone. While I often fall short of taking the proper time to nourish my mind, I attempt to do so through spiritual direction: reading, including spiritual reading, and regular retreats.

For most of you, this commencement that we are celebrating then is the beginning of a mature adult life, a life of free citizens, called to be part of the greatest country in the history of the world.

What a great opportunity! And of course, you are at the same time, challenged with the same challenge faced by even generation of Americans prior to you, that is, to leave the country better than the way you found it.

In this case, I celebrate this commencement because I have the confidence that the intellectual and moral virtues which you've developed here at Christendom have truly prepared you to take up this great cause. I've now just used a word fraught with controversy in America today: virtue.

The fact that this word can scarcely be spoken in public without inviting sarcastic incrimination from many circles is an excellent measure of the challenge you and we all face in our country today.

I was reminded of this in a very personal way several weeks ago. Both activists within and outside of the press distorted an interview that I gave on a recent Supreme Court case. Yet in my remarks on this particular case, I tried to articulate the nature of marriage, the good of marriage. In a few short sentences, I tried to summarize the considerations of philosophies working in tradition stretching back to at least Aristotle, the tradition of natural law. The natural law tradition is not a religious tradition, in the sense that it is based on Divine Revelation. Rather, it's a tradition of philosophical reflection, on the nature of human beings, the kind of creatures we are. The natural law represents guideposts which direct us to the pursuits of happiness, for happiness is the end which natural law has in mind for all of us.

Yet now, the very act of referring to this tradition, of upholding it, or dare say, making any defense of the moral consensus of every civilization in human history, is often characterized as "hate speech."

What is truly regrettable is that the situation is the worst in the very place where this discussion was centered for hundreds of years: the university. Where are the cries from those one-time centers of the pursuit of truth? The tolerance, the diversity when it comes to ideas? Or when it comes to taking the side of the traditional family? This is an especially serious battle for Catholics. Our social teaching holds that the family is the fundamental unit of our society, not the individual, not the group, not the collective. No, the foundational unit which Catholic social teaching is based is the family.

For many generations, Catholics were viewed with suspicion in America. For Catholics in America, my family included, the breakthrough cam with the election of the presidency of John F. Kennedy. But at what price did we earn this break? President Kennedy promised that his faith would have no effect, would have NO effect, on his decisions as President. In effect, what he was saying was that his decisions would be unguided by his conscience. Only now, two generations later, all Americans of faith see ho grave, grave a price was paid. For now our popular culture discourages religion and moral convictions from even being discussed in the public square.

Our founders feared the establishment of a religion. What we are left with today is an establishment of moral nihilism. Not surprisingly, our government, being of the people, is following suit. While much of our culture is removing moral guideposts, so too is the government. With this I have no dispute. We are a representative democracy and eventually the collective conscience of the popular culture is going to be reflective in our laws. My concern is the usurpation of the United States Supreme Court, by the United States Supreme Court, of the people's rights, through their elected representatives, to decide these crucial moral issues and the resulting dulling of our collective consciousness and that this vital debate of who we are and what we're about is being moved from the living rooms of America to the court room.

A lack of focus and clarity about the larger aims of life and about the larger aims of our country's institutions is never dulling. This is especially true in the world since September 11, 2001. We need to summon the moral strength to create a civilization of peace, and justice, and, of course, love. Now this is where you come in. I believe of all the great gifts God has given to the young, the greatest of these are energy, idealism, and rebelliousness (that's your parents laughing). As we have seen, these gifts, like all gifts, can be used for good or for evil. And as we've seen over the past thirty years, they can be used, shall we say, sparingly by our young people. I want to challenge each and every one of you to be a radical, to be a rebel, to rebel against the popular culture. Your task will not be an easy. You must overcome the temptation of silence; the temptation of silence in the face of frequent hostile common opinion. As Catholics you must summon the courage of your convictions, which must be continually nourished by prayer, Mass, and spiritual direction, and to speak and to live the Truth.

And before I close, I would like to give you one obvious reminder and a story. First the reminder. We are all called to love one another. We are all called to love one another...even people who disagree with us and hate us for what we believe! This is a gift that comes only from God, so please ask him for it. If you're like me, you'll need it...frequently! At times, when I'm challenged by some of my colleagues to exhibit this gift, I recall the words of St. Thomas More to his daughter Margaret, as he sat rotting in the Tower of London, awaiting execution based on false charges brought by former colleagues in he government of England.

While visiting him, she was shocked at his equanimity toward his persecutors and he said to her, "I bear no malice or evil will to any living man. For either the man is good, or he is wicked. If he is good, and I hate him, then I am wicked. If he is wicked, either he will amend and die good and go to God, or live wickedly and die wickedly and go to the devil." St. Thomas More goes on to talk about the wicked man. "On the one side, if he amends his life and is saved, he will not fail, if I am saved too, to love me. And then, I shall in like manner love him. On the other side, if he will continue to be wicked and be damned, then there is such outrageous eternal sorrow before him that I may well think myself a deadly cruel wretch if I would not now rather pity his pain than malign his person." More lived intensely and fully on earth, but he always had his focus on the eternal consequences of his actions.

One more point in the story. In your rebellion against the culture, God does not call on you to be successful. He calls on you to be faithful. Now let me give you a story.

President O'Donnell talked about the debate on partial birth abortion. Back in 1998, we were attempting to override the President's veto, this was this second veto of the partial birth abortion ban. We were two votes short and it was the night before the vote. We had been debating the issue all day and it was now eight o'clock at night. The senate was closing down and we were pretty much done for the day. We were going to vote the next morning. But there was something inside me that said, "You know, I really had more to say." No one was in the chambers except the poor soul who had to sit and preside over the Senate. But I felt I needed to say more, even though no one was even listening! So I called my wife, she picked up the phone as I heard the children screaming in the background, and I said, "Honey, it's late I know, but I really feel like I need to stay here and finish this debate." She said, as she always has, she would support me, of course, and take whatever time I needed. So, I went back to the floor and I told the presiding officer I would only be here a few more minutes.

About 100 minutes later, I finished and we closed up the chamber. I went home and the next day we lost. I didn't change one vote!

But a week later I received an email. The email was from a man, a young man your age at Michigan State University. The email read as follows:

On Thursday night, I was zapping through my television with my girlfriend. We were sitting watching TV and I came across you, standing on the floor of the United States Senate with a picture of a baby that you had beside you. And so, we decided to listen for a while. And as we listened and talked about this procedure called partial birth abortion, and these children, I noticed my girlfriend began to cry. I asked her what was wrong and she said, "I'm pregnant and I have an abortion scheduled for tomorrow and I wasn't going to tell you. But I'm not going to have an abortion."

There is now a little girl who is four years old who was adopted by two loving parents. To the world I failed. To the world I failed! We didn't win the vote. But God was faithful. And so it will be with you. I was blessed that that young man wrote me that note for I may have never known. But what I believed, which you much believe, is that God will be faithful.

Finally, you are no doubt familiar with President Kennedy's great inaugural address to the nation: Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. You may not know that it was actually an echo from a talk given in 1843 at Dartmouth College by a great Catholic philosopher Orestes Brownson. I want to close by again congratulating all of you, your parents, and their incredible achievement by reading in full Brownson's words upon which I ask you to reflect on this beginning day:

"Ask not what your age wants, but what it needs, not what it will reward, but what, without which, it cannot be saved; and that go and do; and find your reward in the consciousness of having done your duty, and above all in the reflection, that you have been accounted to suffer somewhat for mankind."

May God bless you. God bless America