As Alexander V processed from St. Peter’s Basilica during his Papal Coronation, carried on his gestatorial chair, a man fell to his knees before him, holding a smoldering cloth, and reminded the new Holy Father, “sic transit gloria mundi (thus passes the glory of the world).” These words must have served as a chilling reminder to the new Pope, adorned with the Papal Tiara, seated on a rich throne, clothed in luxurious vestments, emerging from the opulently gilded Basilica, that these things, though certainly “glorious,” will pass – as would the new Pope himself. We are dust, remember, and to dust we shall return. So too everything around us will fall to dust.
The College of the Holy Cross, as I see it now, could use this reminder. And so, as I leave Mt. Saint James, I wish to give this to her. I do so, not out of spite and malice, but rather out of love. As Saint Augustine tells us in his Monastic Rule:
Do not consider yourselves unkind when you point out such faults. Quite the contrary, you are not without fault yourselves when you permit your brothers to perish because of your silence. Were you to point out their misdeeds, correction would at least be possible. If your brother had a bodily wound which he wished to conceal for fear of surgery, would not your silence be cruel and your disclosure merciful?
Holy Cross, as my Alma Mater, has given me many of my greatest memories, my greatest friends, and my greatest share of wisdom. I will always be thankful to her and her faculty, who provided an incomparable opportunity of study, and I will always be thankful to her as the catalyst for my growth in faith and love of God. These are the great goods available at Holy Cross, through Holy Cross. These are the reasons so many of us love her and continue to love her. The fervent love of God and the wisdom of the ages have seeped into the very soil of Mt. Saint James. They will forever live here as long as Holy Cross does.
But, that does not mean our beloved college is without her faults. The College has made a drastic turn down the path of worldly glory, further obscuring these foundational and all important principals. In the pursuit of wealth, her endowment grows as does students’ tuition. Each year we are faced with an exorbitantly high bill for our education that creeps higher and higher, percentage by percentage. The Holy Cross website now lists the cost of attendance, tuition along with room and board and other fees, at $74,980.
This growth, we are told, is necessary for the goods that the College provides. It is not because they want more money, but because students need more services. It is under the guise of student betterment that the College expands her bureaucracy, draining our bank accounts so that they might flood our emails with correspondence from 82 offices on campus. Only one of these constitutes the entirety of the academic sector. The other 81 are distinct from the immediate function of the College as an educational institution. I’m not suggesting all these are unnecessary. We need an Admissions office and we need Public Safety. But, do we need both an Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and a distinct Office of Multicultural Education? With each of these offices come more Directors, Deans, and Assistant-Deans. With each of these offices come more programming and responsibilities to justify their existence as distinct departments. With each of these offices comes a greater financial burden to the students.
This financial burden runs counter to the College’s apparent dedication to Social Justice. We are inundated with the message of equity, with the condemnations of privilege, and with calls to service and charity. But, might I contend, what is more inequitable than an elite college driving up her already steep cost of attendance? What is more privileged than sitting on an endowment of $1.04 billion, which, I might add, has only increased since the beginning of the pandemic? And it has been no small increase, but a growth of $254 million from its $785.9 million as reported June 30, 2019. The endowment, more than anything, proves the great farce of the College’s supposed dedication to the underprivileged and impoverished. She twists the Catholic principles of Social Justice and embraces Critical Race Theory to condemn many of her students as perpetrators of privilege, while sitting upon vast sums of money to ensure her own stability into perpetuity. She must maintain this endowment to assure that she survives into the ages to come, as a singularly elite institution among the many in our world. She must reserve these stores of money to continue promulgating a message that aligns with the popular trends of the world, so as to glorify herself in its eyes. She, herself, must be seen “fighting” the injustices of the world, and she needs this money to make sure she’s always here, ready and able to do so.
In this quest for glory, the College has pitted herself against the Holy Catholic Church. Rather than seeing herself as a faithful daughter of the Church, her true mother, she has claimed a position of parallel authority. As a Catholic institution, the College of the Holy Cross holds a privileged position in being able to express and develop the varied and complex teachings of the Catholic Church. She can encourage debate and deepen the understanding of the faithful. There is room for discussion within the bounds of the Catholic Church. However, she has sold the long standing teachings and traditions of the Church for 30 pieces of silver, and instead embraced those beliefs which the World wants the Church to believe. She has antagonized and ignored Bishop McManus in his calls for basic adherence to the Church's teachings on gender, sexuality, and even life; a pride flag hangs from her Chaplains Office, and she has publicly condemned McManus for defending life at all stages. She did not stand by him as students started a petition to disinvite him from graduation. Further, through offices like the McFarland Center she presents a warped view of the Catholic Church as no more than a vehicle for charitable service, committed only to a watered down form of “kindness” and the promulgation of the shallow contemporary view of “diversity.” She fails to address the fact that at a Catholic College, no more than 300 students attend Mass on Sundays.
It would be daunting to defend the Church and all she teaches in this day and age. No doubt, the College of the Holy Cross has ignored this privileged opportunity in search of acceptance among the world – in search of glory among the world. Indeed, she has sold the very core of her being and mission in order that the world might praise her as progressive. She seeks better statistics, better rankings, better objective quanta by which she might prove herself as important, as elite, as glorious.
But, what has she lost? She has lost the simple, intrinsic beauty that makes each individual a beloved child of God, in exchange for a corrupted view of the individual as an agglomeration of various “identities.” She has lost the quiet, internal joy that sprouts from a life lived in virtue and true contrition for our own sins and failings in exchange for a view of evil that directs us only outwards towards all-encompassing societal ills so that we can ignore our personal vices. She has lost the wealth of knowledge and wisdom passed on to us from generations gone by, in exchange for classes and faculty who seek to destroy and reshape all that has passed into their own creation. She has lost the true glory that comes from turning all things over to Christ, the eternal glory that never fades, in exchange for that worldly glory that will fade in the blink of an eye.
Indeed, despite the College’s purported dedication to her Jesuit identity, she has lost this identity’s cornerstone, which serves as the motto for the Society of Jesus itself: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, For the Greater Glory of God.
Though the time when Holy Cross, as all things in this world, must pass into dust has not yet come – the eye of her lifetime has not yet blinked – my time to pass from her grounds has arrived. I leave her with great sadness, both for those things here which I love and for my fears about her future. At the end of Walter Miller’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, a contingent of monks leave the earth, tasked with carrying on the Catholic Faith even as the earth meets a nuclear apocalypse. While atom bombs detonate in the distance:
The last monk, upon entering [the spaceship], paused in the lock. He stood in the open hatchway and took off his sandals. "Sic transit mundus," he murmured, looking back at the glow. He slapped the soles of his sandals together, beating the dirt out of them.
In this act, he follows the instruction of Christ missioning his Apostles to go out and spread the Good News in Matthew’s Gospel. Though He gives them the power to heal the sick and cast out demons, He also tells them, “if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.” The monks leave earth, bringing the Faith and Church of Christ with them, for neither was received on earth; the world neglected God and so destroyed itself. In this twist on the phrase, sic transit gloria mundi, only the world (mundus) passes away, not its glory. The earth’s true glory – the Church of Christ – doesn’t pass, for She will live on in the cosmos through the witness of the monks.
As I leave Holy Cross, I know it’s my time to dust off my sandals. The Catholic Church, in her beauty and greatness, is not fully received here, nor are decent values. As the dust from the Apostle’s sandals would remind those who did not accept Christ of their mortality – that they are dust – and thus hasten them to accept Christ’s message, might this article serve as a similar reminder to Holy Cross. May this article, this dust off my feet, serve not as her condemnation, but fill her heart with repentance and remind her of her dependence on God. Might she remember she is mortal, that her glory will fade. Unless, and only unless, she directs all things Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. And, might I remember to bring that which is truly glorious with me to the whole world.
