2022 Baccalaureate Mass and Commencement Ceremony
On May 26, 2022, Chesterton Academy of The Holy Family celebrated its seventh Commencement Ceremony at Sts. Peter and Paul in Naperville, Illinois.
The school is pleased to announce the Class of 2022! This year’s graduating class had twenty-two seniors, and several students graduated with honors.
Members of our graduating class were accepted by a wide range of colleges including the United States Air Force Academy, Washington University of St. Louis, Hillsdale College, Texas A&M University, Baylor University, Belmont Abbey College, University of Illinois at Chicago, Benedictine College, Drake University, Franciscan University of Steubenville, University of Mary, and St. Louis University.
Congratulations, Saints! We are so proud of you! May God’s love and guidance be with you.
Headmaster Dan Janeiro’s Welcome and Speech
Good evening everyone, and welcome to Chesterton Academy of the Holy Family’s 2022 commencement ceremonies. We are blessed to be here in the presence of our lord, to join in recognizing the senior class. To the seniors, and their families, welcome! This may feel like an ending but, as the word commencement implies, it is in fact a beginning. To our Freshman, sophomores and juniors-welcome! This is an ending of sorts—but more of a comma than a period. To our Faculty and staff, to our founders and benefactors, to our chaplain, Fr. Ryan, welcome all!
Big Brother is watching you!
In Orwell’s 1984, this phrase, slapped on posters around the dystopian city of Landing strip 1, formerly known as London, is an omnipresent sign to Winston that his every move is being watched and judged, that truth is only what the party says it is, that he exists only at the whim of the Inner Party.
There are no rules, but that is no escape. Because there are no rules, Winston must live in fear that any action is potentially wrong in the eyes of Big Brother, that his face is being read for evidence of “crimethink”: thoughts that would question the benevolence of Big Brother.
But as Orwell argues most horribly of all, Big Brother is most chillingly effective when it gets into a person’s head, and convinces them to hold two contradictory thoughts, to deny readily apparent truth, to say that 2 +2 = 5. Our country may not yet resemble Winston’s England in all the destruction that has been visited upon the war-torn landscape, but the ongoing dismantling of the English language, the rise of ugliness in art, the control that omnipresent social media allows, shows that the greater destruction Orwell spoke of is already well underway. Many today have accepted the lie that the human intellect cannot discern truth, and has no dependable relationship to any reality outside the one they create.
Winston accepts this mental prison ultimately. He surrenders the independence of his intellect to the overseeing hand of Big Brother.
But you, graduates do not have to.
Instead of Big Brother , you have been given other things: a moral compass, a foundation for the trustworthiness of reality, and an intellect that has been honed by the works that it has encountered.
The compass was the conscience that all of your have been given, but that your parents initially set towards true north, and which Chesterton has occasionally recalibrated. It is trustworthy, and will keep from straying too far from the right path. Trust it, as you trust your friends, and you trust those who love you. Let it guide you—it will remind you that gratitude is perhaps the chief elements of joy, and also the surest prompt towards generous and noble conduct. Don’t avoid doing the wrong thing because of an external punishment. Avoid the wrong thing because it will hurt those you care about, and because you are grateful for the gift of knowing what is right.
The foundation for the truth of reality is also yours—it lies here, in your incarnate nature, a nature that has been ennobled by being shared by an incarnate God, and in the truth of God who seeks to show you his love through every facet of reality. In a time of confusion about the good and truthfulness of the body, of our incarnate nature, and what that tells us about the soul, in a time that denies the existence of a loving God who is the source of truth and its knowability, you will stand out, you will lead others to the things of this world, and beyond them.
You have also been given a glimpse into the world of ideas, and have sharpened your intellects through philosophy, science, math, and art—to glimpse what one poet calls the Archetypes and the Splendors--order, causality, ontology. You know that something cannot be and not be in the same way at the same time. Your mind has been led through the streets of Athens and listened in on Socrates. It has sat with Nicomachus as his father Aristotle instructed him on ethics. It sailed with Odysseus and Aeneas. It fought with Beowulf and sang with Alfred. It learned proportion, color, line and hue from the Old Masters. It wandered through dark woods with Dante, and tilted at windmills with Don Quixote. It followed the patiently marked turns in the labyrinth of Thomas Aquinas’ monumental theology. It looked on in horror at Frankenstein and Faust. It inhabited characters from classic comedies and dramas. It has not yet exited, pursued by a bear.
These you have been given. But you leave here with one more advantage that Winston wished for, and that Big Brother would not allow- friendship. You have been formed for friendship, and you have learned that difficult art through experience. Be good friends, to each other, and to those who will look to you for truth, goodness and Beauty. “Over yourselves I crown and miter you”.