10 June 1988
Niagara University, New York

Your Excellencies and my dear Friends,

I do not know if the records of this University keep note of visitors who pass through Niagara and pay courtesy calls on the community here. Should such records exist, I would be deeply interested to turn back the pages to the year 1884. Sometime in the course of that year Father Thomas McNamara, a seventy-five year old Vincentian from Ireland, crossed the Atlantic and visited some houses of the Community in the United States. He made his way also across the border into Canada and met with the sixty-eight year old Archbishop of Toronto, John Joseph Lynch. It was a meeting of old friends. Almost fifty years had passed from the time they had first met. It was in the year 1835 in the city of Dublin that these two men first became acquainted with each other. There was only a seven year difference in age between the two men, but that was sufficient to make one the teacher of the other. The seventy-five year old Vincentian priest, who in 1884 had crossed the Atlantic and who was visiting with the Archbishop of Toronto, was meeting one of his former pupils. Archbishop Lynch, the first President and Superior in this University was, historical records tell us, the first pupil to enter St. Vincent's College, Castleknock, Dublin. The year was 1835 and one of the priests who received him and taught him was Father Thomas McNamara who now, almost fifty years later, was meeting his former pupil, presumably for the last time, in Toronto.

The group of priests who taught the young John Joseph Lynch was a very small group, and they formed the nucleus around which the Irish Province of the Vincentian Congregation grew. Very likely it was the dedication to the work of education and the preaching of missions, which this group of priests carried on, that inspired John Joseph Lynch to join them in 1839. Three years after his ordination in 1843, and with the permission of his Superiors, he left the shores of Ireland to join the relatively young Province of Vincentians who were working here in the United States. The story of his life after that is familiar to a number of you who are listening to me today. It was in 1856 that John Joseph Lynch opened the doors of the seminary that grew into the University we know today. Father Lynch guided and directed it until the Holy See named him Bishop of Toronto in 1859.

The year 1856 was and will remain a very significant year in the history of this University. It was the beginning of a chapter in the history of the Congregation in the United States, which can rightly be described as a glorious one. It is not for me to read the role of honor of the Alumni of this University, of priests, Sisters and lay people who have at a national and an international level made notable contributions to the well-being of the Church and the State. Allow me just in passing to congratulate the Board of Trustees on the representative character of those whom they have chosen to honor at this convocation. We, who have been honored today, are a diverse group, but all of us rejoice in sharing in some small way the vision of St. Vincent de Paul, a man who studied in two universities during his lifetime. St. Vincent did not easily forget the years he passed in two of France's universities. It is noteworthy that he kept the parchment of his degrees until the end of his life, even if he hid them from the eyes of his Confreres, who would only discover them in his room after his death. We who are being honored here today are indeed grateful to St. Vincent de Paul. We are also grateful to the University of Niagara. May Niagara continue to push back the frontiers of knowledge, shedding all the time, on the territory acquired, the light of the Catholic Faith.

In 1856 while the University of Niagara was receiving its first students, another Catholic University in Ireland was struggling to be born. At the request of the Irish hierarchy John Henry Newman, later Cardinal, had in the 1850s worked to launch a university in Dublin, commuting between England and Ireland no less than seventy-two times. The university would be Catholic in ethos and would offer to its students an education of the highest academic standards. The difficulties that Doctor Newman encountered were very formidable and he did not judge his efforts to have been notably successful. However, the years of Cardinal Newman's labors in Dublin were fruitful in many respects. It was thanks to his experience in Ireland that today we have his work, The Idea of a University, a book that will for centuries to come challenge all who are engaged in the task of university education. Doctor Newman was an Englishman in Ireland. Like many other Englishmen in Ireland of yesterday and of today, he found it difficult to understand what the poet Tennyson called, "The blind hysterics of the Celt." So it was that the Archbishop of Dublin, later Cardinal Cullen, advised Doctor Newman that, if he wanted to acquire some background knowledge of the social and political scene in Ireland, he would do well to consult two Vincentian priests, Father Thomas McNamara and Father Philip Dowley. (cf. Letters and Diaries of J.H. Newman, vol. 16, p. 272). From the correspondence of Doctor Newman we know that he did consult them. The Vincentian Community was not unknown to John Henry Newman. After his reception into the Catholic Church he gave some thought to joining St. Vincent's Community. In the last decade of his life, when he was a Cardinal, he wrote to a Vincentian in Dublin: "I recollect well how, when I became a Catholic, the first religious body which attracted my reverend notice was yours." (Letter 15 Nov. 1882 to Rev. M. O'Callaghan. Original in C.M. Archives, Dublin.)

He chose St. Philip's Oratory. He retained, however, until the end of his life what he called "sympathy and interest in the Congregation of St. Vincent." (Ibid.). He would undoubtedly have been pleased to learn that the new university which was rising within earshot of the great Niagara Falls was being placed under the patronage of the Virgin Mary. For only two months before he was received into the Catholic Church in October 1845, John Henry Newman had begun to wear as an Anglican the Miraculous Medal.

Of these three men, John Joseph Lynch, Father Thomas McNamara and John Henry Cardinal Newman, it is the latter who is the most celebrated. For us, however, of the Vincentian Community, and particularly of the local Vincentian community here in Niagara, it is gratifying to think that the Founder of this Seminary-University was taught by a man who was guide and friend to Newman, during the years when the latter was launching the Catholic University in Dublin.

It was while he was in Dublin that Cardinal Newman wrote: "A great university is a great power and can do great things; but unless it is something more than human, it is but foolishness and vanity in the sight and in the comparison of the little ones of Christ." (Univ. Sermons, p. 58).

The little ones of Christ, that last phrase evokes St. Vincent de Paul. Perhaps it may surprise some of you to learn that the great patron of the poor considered evangelical simplicity to have been his gospel. "Simplicity," he said, "is my gospel." (Conf. Eng. ed., 24 Feb. 1653, p. 538). Universities speak to us much more of complexity than of simplicity. Yet G.K. Chesterton remarked: "The chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things. The chief object of education is to unlearn all the wickedness of the world and get back into that state of exhilaration we all instinctively celebrate when we write by preference of children." (All Things Considered, p. 53).

I would like to think that any Vincentian university has inherited from St. Vincent de Paul two distinguishing features; first, a love and practical concern for the neglected people of this world. Does not the word 'neglected' mean unchosen, a concern for the unchosen people, that is, for those who are not singled out by governments and other agencies for favor? Second, a university that has St. Vincent de Paul as its inspiring patron will have a certain stamp of evangelical simplicity about it. At its deepest level simplicity is the policy of acting always with only God in view, or to quote St. Vincent, "to see and judge things from Christ's point of view." (CR II, 5).

Evangelical simplicity is an indispensable condition for graduating in that great university in which at present we are all undergraduates and whose Chancellor is Jesus Christ. He confers degrees after years of meritorious work, but the degrees we all hope to receive at the end of the day of our life's work will be, in the last analysis, degrees Honoris Causa.