For more information on Thomas Aquinas College contact David A. Shaneyfelt at dshaneyfelt@thomasaquinas.edu.
“If you remember only these two words from my Commencement Address,” said Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, O.P., “I [will be] very happy as a teacher: fundari amicitiam – build up a friendship.” The Archbishop of Vienna spoke before graduates and some 1,200 guests on the campus of Thomas Aquinas College on June 8. Fifty-nine seniors from 20 states, Canada, Austria, and Puerto Rico, received bachelor of arts degrees.
A close advisor to Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Schonborn received the College’s Thomas Aquinas Medallion, an award reserved to those who have demonstrated extraordinary dedication to God and His Church. Schonborn served as Director of the Catechism of the Catholic Church which the Holy Father promulgated in 1994. And since his appointment as Archbishop of Vienna in 1995, he has brought order and faith to an archdiocese that was rife with public scandal and controversy from his predecessor.
In 1996, he preached the Lenten spiritual exercises for the Pope and the Roman Curia. Since 1998, he has been President of the Austrian Bishops’ Conference.
Concelebrating Baccalaureate Mass with Cardinal Schonborn, and serving as principal homilist, was Fr. C. John McCloskey III, Director of the Catholic Information Center in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. Fr. McCloskey also serves as the U.S. representative for the ecclesiastical faculties of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and the University of Navarre in Pamplona, Spain.
Cardinal Schonborn spoke on “Love and Friendship,” expounding on the works of St. Thomas Aquinas regarding man’s ability to form a friendship with God. “If there is a phrase that sums up the entire Summa Theologica, it is, in my opinion, this fundari amicitiam. God wishes to build up a friendship with His creatures. The whole way of human and Christian life has its deepest sense in [our] building [a] friendship with God. And the entire ethics, the entire Christian morals, are summed up in the idea of building up friendship with God and among us.”
“Man is made in God’s image,” he explained, “and he is therefore called upon to realize this image by moving freely towards this goal.” “The whole sense of human life,” he said, “is in realizing this image through friendship with God.”
St. Thomas, he says, “shows that this building of friendship has a very concrete place – in community and, hence, friendship with Jesus Christ. In Him, God has fully communicated with us humans. Thus, it is a matter of building friendship with God, in a concrete way, as friendship with Jesus Christ, who came to the world to make us His friends.”
Cardinal Schonborn commended the faithful to model the thinking and virtues of St. Thomas “to the extent that our search for truth moves us to seek traces of truth everywhere. St. Thomas could never have integrated Aristotle so strongly if he had not been convinced that Christ, the Eternal Word, is that Truth which illuminates all mankind. Wherever the light of truth is to be found, there one should question, listen, and gratefully welcome the truth that shows itself.”
“This, in turn, means always being ready, for the sake of truth, to reveal error, and to refute it. But both the welcoming of truth and the refutation of error require a great willingness to dialogue with, to listen to, and to try to understand the other. St. Thomas in his incomparable way carried on a dialogue with all the great masters of the past and his present. There’s no surer guide to a Christian culture of dialogue than that of St. Thomas Aquinas.
“Today, it is particularly topical and important to study carefully St. Thomas’ relationship to Islamic philosophy, especially that of Averroes. St. Thomas fought with all his might against Averroes’ teaching that God was the sole cause, the unique intellectus agens. God is not made great by the fact that His creatures are kept small. His true greatness is shown, not in the total helplessness of his creatures, but in His enabling them to act themselves as proper causes. The consequences of this view are immense.
“They are properly the Catholic understanding of our responsibility in the world. The Catholic view of Christian humanism is the emphasis on the importance of the second causes, of their relative autonomy in all areas of action. I think it can be shown that the scientific culture of Christian countries of our Western culture is deeply [connected to] this view that creatures are able to be themselves active and causes. It could further be demonstrated how the Western understanding of participation and democracy grew out of this understanding. The effects of Christian humanism are particularly clear in the areas of human dignity and human rights.”
