Class Speaker: “We Were Part of one of the Greatest Endeavors in the World”

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“We Were Part of one of the Greatest Endeavors in the World”

by Pedro Da Silva (NE’25)
Senior Address
Commencement 2025
Thomas Aquinas College, New England

President O’Reilly, Dean Cain, Fr. Murray, Dr. Roberts, ladies and gentlemen of the Board of Governors, members of the faculty, families and friends of the College:

I want to start thanking all of you for all the support, love, and care throughout these four years. Nothing of what we have done would have been possible without your prayers, efforts, and dedication. I want especially to thank all the families, who formed us, prepared us, and endured our not being home for four years. Thank you in the name of the Class of 2025. Now, you must excuse me for addressing particularly my classmates.

My dear friends, we have won. We have won the race of the past four years. We have completed our education. And this is why you have put me in a very difficult situation by choosing me to speak and praise you today. I knew from the very beginning that I could neither do justice to the love I have for you, nor could I properly express how good this college and all of you are. As I think many of you, myself included, have been realizing in the past few days, there is always more that we could say to each other. Words seem to be insufficient to explain what happened here and how much we love this place and one another.

Nonetheless, as I was writing this, thinking of my lost cause, many of you came to my mind, as an encouragement, through your examples and words. Therefore, trying to follow your example, I will try my best, knowing that the purpose of this speech is to “let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your father who is in heaven” (Mt. 5:16). Because of the difficulty and the greatness of the task, I will ask the intercession of our patron saints, the Forty Holy Martyrs of Sebaste, who in a lost battle did not stop encouraging each other to keep fighting in order to achieve the crown of martyrdom.

And in reflecting more, I already see my prayers being answered, for looking at the Forty Martyrs I see an example and model of what we did at Thomas Aquinas College. They were one army, one whole, ordered to one end. And as we learned this year, the good of the whole universe is likened to the good of an army, so I hope that, by using the exemplar of our Forty Martyrs, I may be able to praise not only you and our education, but somehow also to speak of something greater than all of us. I will try to show here that the exemplarity of the Forty Martyrs lies in their exceling over all other armies because they won the greatest victory, they were the most ordered, and they had the greatest leader.

They won the greatest victory because they won the crown of martyrdom and now share the glory of God in Heaven. They were the most ordered, first in the order of nature, for they were the most disciplined and accomplished Roman legion. But more than that, they were also the most ordered in the order of grace, for the Holy Spirit was their bond, charity directing all their actions to the heroic acts of virtue. They were the greatest army principally because they had the greatest of leaders, for when obliged to worship Caeser and deny Christ, they chose the true king of the universe, Who, being a real general of the Christian people, knew already the victory that was to come and lead their charge to the Heavenly City, opening its gates to all of us.

As you can see, the Forty Martyrs were truly great. Now, I would dare to say that our education here has also exceled others for similar reasons: We have fought a great battle, in the most perfect order, and under the best of leaders.

“We have fought the great battle of trying to perfect ourselves and live according to the most divine part in us, reason.”

We have fought the great battle of trying to perfect ourselves and live according to the most divine part in us, reason. We can call this truly a battle because we see how hard it was, how much we struggled in order to know the truth and love the good. We struggled learning mathematical propositions, understanding Latin stems, and observing the heavenly spheres. More than that, we struggled to understand the proofs for God’s existence, the Trinity and the Incarnation, and the Presence of Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament. We struggled with the lowest of subjects and the highest of mysteries. But we did it, we achieved the goal, we made a beginning in the path of knowing and loving Wisdom itself.

And friends, we not only fought the greatest of battles, but we fought it in the most perfect order. To know order is to know what comes before and what comes after, and we always started with what we knew first and moved to what is more known in itself. We started talking about the way that things can be said of others, to the cause of being itself. We ordered our mind with the Organon, whose end was to bring about in our minds the formation and order of a phalanx. From there we started to study the causes and principles of all mobile beings. We raised our minds to the most perfect of material beings, men. We compared and analyzed discoveries in physics, chemistry, and biology. We completed our studies of this world with a consideration of its creator, His properties known by reason, the Mystery of the Trinity and its unfolding in the story of salvation.

But above all, we have fought under the greatest of leaders. As Mr. Berquist taught so well, what defines this college is discipleship, which implies that one leads and the other follows. But it was Christ Himself who came to lead us in this education. How good is our Leader that He wants to share His leadership with so many people. His causality is so powerful that He also causes others to be causes. He is such a master that He makes others to share in His teaching. He gave us a wonderful leader on earth, the Pope (and here we add our joy and love in having Pope Leo XIV elected so close to this day), and all his captains, the bishops and priests, two in particular have led us so well throughout these four years.

Our Lord has also given us tutors, who partake in His leadership through their guidance of our intellects. He gave us the authors of the Great Books, who we call professors. He gave us especially St. Thomas Aquinas, who is one of the greatest of soldiers of Christ’s army, and whom we take as our great leader. More than that, Our Lord gave the power of teaching and leading to each one of you, who many times helped me to learn and follow the virtue, and I hope, I was able to do that to you.

“More than anything, let us love each other deeply, and never forget what we have learned here.”

With these, my friends, I can then say, with confidence, that during these four years we were part of one of the greatest endeavors in the world: a great battle, with a great army, under the greatest of leaders.

But lest anyone of you thinks that the battle is done, we must remember that we are about to depart. You know how much this makes me sorrowful, how much I will miss you and of what we did. But the world needs us. Remember that we are soldiers of Christ in virtue of our confirmation and that we need to defend the Church. But please, do not misunderstand me if I sound too militaristic. This war that I speak of is won by love, prayer, and sacrifice. We need to bring all men to Christ, our leader, for He thirsts for all souls.

Let’s use all that we have achieved here as the tools of this holy war, to sanctify ourselves and bring the whole under the banner of the Cross. More than anything, let us love each other deeply, and never forget what we have learned here so that at the end of our lives we can say together with the Forty Martyrs and Our Lady, Help of Christians, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.”

May God bless the Class of 2025.

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