Via Veritas Via
I recently attended the University of Glasgow’s Commemoration Day. It is an event I like to attend annually as a representative of the Catholic Church in these parts. Commemoration Day is really the celebration of the University’s birthday (or foundation) in 1451. The Day begins with a Service in the University Chapel, continues with a Ceremony of Honorary Graduations and concludes with a very nice lunch in the Hunter Halls. All of these are most enjoyable but for me the most significant is the Chapel Service which reminds the congregation that the University was born ex corde ecclesiae, or from the heart of the Catholic Church. It was founded by the then Bishop of Glasgow, William Turnbull, on the grant of a Papal Bull issued by Pope Nicholas V which placed the University under the divine patronage of the Lord Jesus Christ, Via, Veritas et Vita, our Way, our Truth and our Life. For the first decade University lectures took place in the crypt of the Glasgow Cathedral before the first College was built on the grounds of the Blackfriars College on the High Street. Much has passed under the bridge since those days of its founding. With the Protestant Reformation there was a new constitution which continues in effect today and means that the University remains a Christian institution.
The gradual secularisation of Scotland has changed the Christian feel of the University but vestiges still remain of its roots in the likes of the Christian worship that begins the University day in the Memorial Chapel, built in commemoration of those members of the University community who fell in the two great wars. Every graduation ceremony begins with the Erasmus prayer with its petition to Jesus, and sends out the new graduates under the triune blessing of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
All of this is testimony to the harmony between faith and reason that has always been the mind of the Church. In these days we labour under cultural myth that you have to choose between either faith or reason in making sense of our world. Commemoration Day reminds us all of the more perennial truth, given to us so perceptively by Pope St. John Paul II in his image of faith and reason as the two wings by which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth.