(Remarks as prepared)
Distinguished guests, faculty, staff, friends, family, and above all, fellow classmates, welcome! What a joy it is to be with you today. I鈥檇 like to start by saying thank you. To our friends and family, for supporting us every step of the way. To our professors, for teaching us, challenging us, and pretending not to notice when we fell asleep in class. To our priests, rectors, and mentors, who stood by our side in our hardest moments. To our university staff, like Maria, who always greeted us at North Dining Hall, or Cory, who always asked about our weekend as he cleaned the halls of Fisher. Thank you for making Notre Dame our home. And finally, to my classmates: we made it.
Finding our way to this university was a unique journey for each one of us. For me, that journey was a little unconventional. Growing up as the son of two Argentinian immigrants, I had never heard about Notre Dame. Once I was admitted, I learned all sorts of things: I learned that Notre Dame is not in Louisiana. I learned that Notre Dame had a football team. I also learned that this team is rather good. This news has yet to reach the College Football Playoff Committee. Whatever path we took to arrive here, we left behind the familiar and stepped into an experience full of unknowns.
The same was true of Fr. Sorin. He left behind his home in France, and first set foot on these grounds in 1842. Like us, he didn鈥檛 know what lay before him. He arrived in the middle of a cold winter, welcomed by two frozen lakes. As he gazed upon this frigid landscape, he wrote: 鈥淓verything was frozen, and yet it all appeared so beautiful.鈥� He knew that he had no money and no students. And yet, he stood in the snow and found the courage to build something that would radiate warmth in this cold world.
This past January, my friend Wes and I saw an opportunity to build something of our own. After finishing class for the afternoon, we took some recycling bins onto the quad and began filling them with snow. We didn鈥檛 have any plans or calculations. We just used the materials we could find: water from our dorm showers, two bunk bed ladders, and a car hood. As the days went by, a small chapel began to rise out of the snow. First the columns, then the roof, and finally the details. On their way to and from the dorm, our classmates chipped in. They helped to shovel snow, compact bricks, and lay the arches. Together, amidst the cold, we built something sacred.
Six days later, on a frigid Monday night, we came together for mass. Students, staff, members of the South Bend community. In 19-degree weather, we huddled around this chapel made of ice. In this moment, we discovered that we had built more than a structure. Together, we had built a community. In the gathering of these individuals, so different from one another, our hearts radiated warmth. A sacred warmth.
Every one of us has built something during our time at Notre Dame. We built robots with physics and math, built essays out of stories, and built boats for the Fisher Regatta with supplies we found in a dumpster. Whether in internships or classrooms, in our dorms or on the quad, we all came to create something, just like Fr. Sorin. What did he see in that frozen landscape? He saw you and he saw me. He saw researchers fighting to end disease, he saw students tutoring at a local middle school, he saw members of a choir sharing their gifts, and he saw neighbors cracking jokes in a dorm hallway. Over these last four years, at every turn, we cultivated warmth for others.
This is the very kind of warmth our world so desperately needs. A world paralyzed by the cold of indifference, a world comfortable with looking the other way. I know that I鈥檝e felt this cold within myself, and I bet you have, too. I think of all the times I鈥檝e been walking down a street, focused on my destination, when I come across a man sitting on the curb. I immediately become uncomfortable. I start fidgeting. I glance in the other direction. I pretend he isn鈥檛 there. I鈥檓 afraid to look at his fragile humanity for fear that he will see mine.
This is the cold of the world we inhabit. We can鈥檛 escape it. So, what is there left to do? The only thing we can: build inside it. When we stop seeing the cold as a threat and start seeing it as an opportunity, we begin to create sacred spaces of encounter. In a speech like this, I鈥檓 supposed to say how we will change the world as lawyers, CEOs, doctors, or teachers. And we will. But our time at Notre Dame has helped me realize that before we are any of those things, we are something else first: a brother, a sister. The change we wish to see occurs by radiating warmth, one person at a time. Sometimes, it鈥檚 as simple as a smile or a hug.
Every summer, I spent a couple of months in Buenos Aires, at a community center in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. Working there, I had the privilege of growing close to people who bear unimaginable wounds: addiction, abuse, hunger. In this place, so full of brokenness and grace, pain and laughter, I found a home, a family. One night, on a retreat we had planned for the high schoolers in the neighborhood, we walked to a small chapel. As the young people lined up outside, a loved one waited inside, ready to welcome them with a hug. I watched from a distance as each one of them stepped in, melted into the embrace, and began to weep. Life had been so cold for them that this embrace, this moment of tenderness, radiated a sacred warmth. Once everyone had gone in, and it was my turn to receive a hug, I also began to cry uncontrollably. I was overwhelmed. Because when we share warmth with someone else, it washes over us, too. And slowly, in our hearts, there ceases to exist an 鈥渦s鈥� and a 鈥渢hem,鈥� to make way for simply 鈥渦s.鈥�
Here, on the margins, is where society is coldest. Here is where we must bring warmth. For each of us, this will look different. It may be a homeless man we encounter on our way to work. It may be a coworker eating lunch alone, whom we can invite out to eat. Or it may be someone sitting by themselves in the last pew at church, whom we can approach after mass. In these individuals we meet face-to-face 鈥� in the migrant, in the poor, in the lonely 鈥� we behold the face of Jesus. In them, we find our calling: to build community, to spread warmth, to be united in kinship as brothers and sisters.
Class of 2026: today we are sent into the world: to Wall Street and classrooms, to hospitals and courtrooms. Like Fr. Sorin, we stand before a world that has grown cold. And though the people we encounter may know nothing about Notre Dame, we can leave a mark on their hearts with the warmth we have cultivated here. This may seem daunting. But we鈥檝e been doing it for four years, and we are just getting started.