(Remarks as prepared)
Board Chair Veihmeyer, Father Dowd, Faculty, Members of the Board, Parents, Graduates — my two favorite candidates for the next Laetare medal, my sister Maria and my wife Linda — and all members of the Notre Dame Family: I’m deeply indebted to you for this honor. But my debt to Notre Dame is even bigger than you think. Let me explain!
Seventy-five years ago, Eunice Kennedy, who was not yet my mother, was summoned here to Notre Dame by its new President, Fr. Hesburgh.
She believed she had a vocation to become a nun. But her dad, Joe Kennedy, wanted her to marry her boyfriend, a guy named Sargent Shriver, who had asked for her hand in marriage.
So Joe Kennedy made an appeal to Ted Hesburgh, who had known my mother and father for a number of years. “Father Ted,” he said. “Eunice won’t listen to me on this. But she will listen to you. Please talk to her.”
Fr. Ted told my mother that she did indeed have a vocation. But her vocation was to marry my father and keep doing the work of the Church as a lay Catholic and a leader of her family. Shortly after her talk with Fr. Ted, just after Mass on a Sunday morning, my mother asked my father to join her at a side altar and accepted his offer of marriage.
So for the many of you here who believe that in one way or another you owe your life to Notre Dame. Believe me. I get it!
This morning, I want to thank the heroes whose love and guidance have led me to this day. My prayer is that I can be a worthy channel for their grace.
My heroes began coming to me in waves when I graduated from college and became a high school teacher in New Haven Connecticut. I spent 14 years there being tutored by the teenagers I was supposed to teach.
I tried to teach them social studies. They tried to teach me how difficult it is to thrive in poverty.
I tried to teach them to be successful. They tried to teach me that success requires people who believe in you.
And that became my calling.
One student of mine, Jennie, was 14 years old when we met. She heard every day from people that she was a nobody. She couldn’t imagine being a person who mattered. I decided to pay a visit to her home to find out how I could support her and her mom. And she told me years later, “That day you visited my house, you poured a little self-worth into me. That’s all it took to change my life.”
Actually, it was God who poured the self-worth into Jennie. I just saw it — and did my best to honor it. And she did the same for me. She believed in me — and I can never repay her for the goodness that her faith in me brought out of me.
A few years later, I left New Haven to lead Special Olympics — which is simply a global witness to the truth that every human being is a sacred creation, with inherent dignity, made in the image and likeness of God — and should be treated that way.
The precious occasions when we can gather and see this truth together are moments of lasting grace. Let me tell you about one.
In 2003, the Special Olympics World Games took place in Ireland. They were the first games where athletes with the most severe disabilities were offered a chance to participate. Personally, I wasn’t sure how people would react. I wondered if anyone was going to show up, and I worried that the athlete’s limitations might leave everyone feeling sad. Then I learned that the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, would attend and would be seated next to me as my guest.
By the time President McAleese arrived, the parking lot in Dublin was jammed and the hall was packed. Credit the Irish for showing up. The games were on!
Donal Page from County Galway was announced onto the stage to perform the “grasp and release”. Donal suffered an illness just after birth that left him unable to speak or walk. He was helped to the stage in his wheelchair and was positioned near a table with a bean bag on it. His challenge was to reach out, grab the bean bag, lift it, and move it to the end of the table.
The crowd was excited, a voice shouted “Start” … and nothing happened; Donal was still — and the arena was silent — for a full minute. Then Donal’s hand started moving toward the bean bag, and one fan in the crowd shouted “Come on lad. Let’s see it!” And that sent a shiver of excitement through the hall. Then, slowly, after a span of five minutes, Donal’s hand reached the bean bag, and another voice shouted “There you go, lad! Now grab it!”
Donal willed his hand to grasp the bean bag, and the crowd exploded in cheers. Then, over another five minutes — as we were standing, cheering, shouting, yelling, laughing, stomping and crying — Donal moved the beanbag to the end of the table, set it down…. and unleashed bedlam.
I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since — and I realize now why there was such joyous madness in the hall. We were on the home field of the Fighting Irish!! And on that field, on that day, all of us were fighting for one of us. There was no foe, no enemy, no villain. We were a mass of humanity rooting for humanity. And humanity won — because humanity was one.
My teachers, you see, never asked me for pity or condescension. They asked that I see their dignity. They want what you want and what I want: they want to matter. So today I accept this award with a challenge from them. Let’s all commit to wake up to the dignity, to the inherent worth, in each one of us — in every community, in every culture, in every country, all over the world.
We can do this! Yes, there are obstacles. Many will tell you the world is too broken to repair; that we’re too different, that it’s too difficult to get along. And it’s true that we’re facing deep polarization today. But our polarization is nothing but a mark of how we are treating each other. And we can change! No matter how far apart we’ve grown – honoring each other’s dignity can bring us back together.
The power of honoring human dignity is more than a belief. It is a spiritual practice.
Thomas Merton saw the radiant dignity inside each of us:
“At the center of our being” he wrote, “ is a point of … pure truth, a … spark which … is the pure glory of God in us…. It is in everybody, and if we could see it …. It would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.”
And yes, darkness and cruelty will come. From my earliest memories, when tragedies shook my family, my parents taught us a spiritual practice: the prayers of the rosary. We went to Our Lady. We hoped to experience Mary’s great Yes – which opened the way for God to enter the world.
Over the years, I have continued to hold fast to those rosary beads. Because we all have our own Yes. And I try, however failingly, to say my “yes” too. To say yes, as she did, to the presence of God within; to say Yes, as she did, to opening the way for God to enter the world.
If that sounds mystical, it is! So be a mystic! Allow grace to remove any obstacle that separates you from the presence of God within -- so that grace can also remove any obstacle that separates you from the presence of God in others. Because in the eyes of God, there ARE no “least of these, no ‘them and us.” There is no less of God in any of us.
The only difference is in our ability to say yes.
This ability to say yes is the core of the spiritual movement now sweeping the world, a movement we are all now called to join — a movement to say Yes to dignity as the standard for how we treat each other – in our families, in our schools, in our faith and in our work.
This is both an ancient call …. and the most urgent call of our times.
In answering the call, Notre Dame graduates, you have an extravagant advantage. You have been schooled here — on this campus, in this special place – and your university was blessed for this calling even before Father Sorin baked the first brick to build Notre Dame.
So as you leave this home field of the Fighting Irish to launch the next chapter of your lives
What would you fight for?
What were you born to fight for?
I pray you will fight to honor the inherent dignity in every human being — and renew the face of the earth.
GO IRISH!