Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on August 6, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
“Truth is accessible.”
Though George Weigel said this at a Ukrainian university in 2013, it holds true today for universities across the United States.
In “Pomp, Circumstance, and Unsolicited Advice,” Weigel, the biographer of Pope St. John Paul II, compiles graduation speeches and university lectures from the past three decades. Ignatius Press provided a copy to The College Fix.
Weigel reiterates throughout the book there is no such thing as “my truth” or “your truth.”
“[T]here is actually something properly called ‘the truth,’ which we can access, if imperfectly and incompletely, through reason,” he told the graduates of Ukrainian Catholic University.
While the advice is Catholic in nature, it is also catholic in nature, universal and applicable to all students.
“Think of your life as a vocation,” Weigel told students at Mount St. Mary’s University in 2009, paraphrasing St. John Paul II. This is in opposition to thinking of education just as focused on a “career.”
Catholic universities need a reminder as well of their mission. “Catholic higher education exists to form vocationally serious men and women in whom faith and reason support a transforming conviction: the conviction that every human life is, by definition, extraordinary,” he told graduates of the Maryland university.
In an email to the Fix, Weigel said Catholic universities, and universities in general, should have a “rigorous core curricula.”
“A core curriculum that immerses students for the first two years in the philosophical, theological; literary, and artistic classics of western civilization should convince even the most skeptical minds that there are truths built into the world and into us,” Weigel told the Fix. He said these truths “describe the pathways to personal flourishing and social solidarity.”
Asked what bishops and the pope can do to reiterate the importance of Catholic universities remaining focused on Catholicism and its truths, Weigel said the prelates need to take responsibility for what happens in their diocese.
“Bishops have to live up to the theological and canonical fact that they ‘own’ the Catholic ‘brand’ in their dioceses,” he said. “When putatively ‘Catholic’ colleges and universities engage in behaviors that contradict settled truths of Catholic faith and moral reason, it’s the bishop’s obligation — not least as a matter of consumer protection with respect to parents and students — to declare that such schools are not ‘Catholic’ and cannot describe themselves as such.”
In a 2012 speech in Argentina, Weigel made similar points. Catholic universities, he said, should have students read St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and teachings of the Catholic Church.
Some Catholic universities need this reminder – at the University of Portland, for example, theology students, now called “theology and religious studies,” are no longer required to take a “Biblical Texts” class. Instead, as reported by the Fix, they can take “Queer Theologies” or “God our Mother.”
The book is a generally good overview of controversies in Catholic education.
However, the lectures to a university audience of academics and scholars can be wordier and harder to follow for the average person. To be fair, this is the occupational hazard of taking an academic lecture meant for a certain audience and trying to make it part of a book with a broader reach.
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Still, the book is a delightful reminder of how the Catholic Church has responded to important controversies in the past three decades. A 2002 speech at the Catholic University of America’s law school provides insights into debates about just war theory in the context of the country’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
A 2012 graduation speech at Benedictine College in Kansas reminds readers of the battles fought over religious freedom during the Obama administration, when the president tried to force Catholic nuns to pay for birth control.
The book should prompt parents and students to think about the purpose of higher education. University presidents and other leaders, particularly those at Catholic institutions, should also think to what degree they are helping students pursue a vocation strengthened by truth.
To borrow a phrase from Weigel, Godspeed on your journey.
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