Published May 10, 2025
Franciscan University of Steubenville
Thank you, Father Dave, for that warm introduction.
And deepest thanks, from me, and on behalf of my husband, Seamus, to you, the Trustees, and the Franciscan family for this great honor.
Seamus and I have numerous Franciscan graduates in our family, and among our friends and colleagues. But now… We’re delighted officially to be part of the Franciscan family. Thank you.
To the class of 2025 and your loved ones – I’m particularly grateful and honored to be able to celebrate this wonderful milestone with you, and to share a few thoughts on this occasion. My husband is no longer able to travel but is with you in prayer today.
My first order of business: Congratulations, to the class of 2025! You are talented, faith-filled, gifted young women and men. You’ve shown resilience, creativity, and perseverance during your time here at Franciscan. I have no doubt that God has many great things in store for each of you personally, and for those whom you will serve.
To the parents and families—congratulations as well. Your commitment to your sons and daughters has certainly been essential to their achievements today, and you rightly share in their success.
Today, my contribution is to share a perspective on the world you will enter—with the turn of your tassels—and to offer a few thoughts on your importance, the contribution you will make, to families, culture, and to the Church, at this pivotal juncture.
Cambridge Historian Richard Rex, writing in First Things, describes three “agonizing” crises the Church has faced over time. First, the Arian crisis, a dispute over who God is, then, post-Reformation, the crisis over what the Church is. But today, Rex writes, we face a third crisis over who we are, a crisis over what it means to be human.
In Veritatis Splendor, Pope St. John Paul II warned of this looming crisis, observing that the Church’s moral teachings were increasingly denied not so much because of a distorted understanding of freedom, but because of a faulty anthropology, a distorted understanding of the human person.
By 2012—right about the time most of you were entering third or fourth grade— Pope Benedict XVI identified this anthropological crisis more precisely as “gender ideology,” saying it was now clear that,
“[T]he very notion of being—of what being human really means—is being called into question…What is put forward today under the term ‘gender’ [is] a new philosophy of sexuality,” where “sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves.”
By now, most of us are familiar with the claims of gender ideology. Anyone on TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram sees how gender ideology has permeated the culture. Some of you no doubt have seen Matt Walsh’s video (What is a woman) or followed the political battles here in Ohio to stop sex-rejecting medical procedures for minors, or cheered when the federal government (finally!) came down on the side of truth (known by faith and reason) that sex is binary. The truth that each of us is irrevocably male or female.
Gender ideology’s impact on the culture has had very real consequences for your generation: 23% of Gen Z—one out of four of your peers—describe their primary identity as “LGBTQ.” Many have never heard that their most fundamental identity is as sons and daughters of the Lord. Outside of places like Franciscan, your peers are more likely to know someone who identifies as “LGBTQ” than to know someone who is a practicing Christian.
Gender ideology didn’t spring up spontaneously. It was midwifed into culture, after a long gestation, by atheists and ideologues seeking to remake the world in their own godless image. For a time, they successfully evicted God from public education, public conversations, and moral decision-making, elevating instead an archetype of a new kind of (supposedly) “devout Catholic,” the kind with a divided heart, typified by many politicians. I was a student at Notre Dame when the late Mario Cuomo, the former Governor of New York, came to campus and gave his historic speech: It was the first time a Catholic politician justified his support for abortion on the grounds that he was “personally opposed” to abortion, but would never think of “imposing” his views on others. Not long afterwards, in Christifideles Laici, Pope St John Paul II decried “[t]his split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives,” saying it “deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age.”
Although religious liberty lawyers, like my husband (before he retired) have fought hard to regain and protect the rights of religious believers and institutions, they cannot unmuzzle those who choose to be silent, they cannot repair the divided hearts of those who choose worldly power over truth. Those are spiritual problems, not religious liberty problems. The decline of Christianity and the rising hostility towards objective truth set the stage for gender ideology, because, to paraphrase Pope Benedict XVI, once man loses sight of God, he quickly loses sight of the truth about himself.
But what does this anthropological revolution have to do with you?
There are no sidelines in a revolution, no bleacher seats to occupy, far above the fray. You are in it. The world in which you will work, live, and raise your own families has been profoundly marked by this anthropological shift.
But it is time for a counter-revolution. Your world—and the Church—need the witness and work of outstanding, virtuous young men and women to counter this anthropological revolution. We need men and women like you, whose faith reflects a dynamic orthodoxy, whose hearts embrace the call to missionary discipleship. (Indeed, we are already seeing signs of this counter-revolution in the surge of baptisms around the world this Easter season. Young people are leading the way, entering the Church in record numbers, and speaking with boldness about what’s true.)
You are ready for this challenge. You are ready for this challenge, thanks to the families that nurtured you. And thanks, in no small part, to this wonderful University, which has created an environment that supports and forms students, teaching you to live a fully human life as you mature into young men and young women. You know the truth about what it means to be a human person, because you’ve been taught it, certainly in the classroom but also in the wider campus community. You have seen respect for the dignity and value of each and every person modeled in the lives of your faculty, mentors, chaplains, and fellow students. In countless Masses, households, prayer groups, spiritual opportunities, and campus activities, you have learned deep lessons about truth, virtue, forgiveness, and service.
During your years at Franciscan, the truth that we humans are made for relationship, for giving of ourselves, first to God and then to others, has become real.
And now, the God who providentially guided you here, who gifted you with an outstanding education here at Franciscan, is calling you, as you step into the great world, to show the world what it means to be truly human.
With that in mind, I have three short pieces of advice.
To our young men: The world needs you. Masculinity is not toxic, only sin is toxic. A culture so confused about humanity and relationships needs authentic models of virtuous manhood, distinguished by strength of character, a father’s protective heart for the vulnerable, respect for the dignity of women, an attitude of service, and the habit of sacrifice, for the good of others. To be a virtuous man is good. The world needs good men. We need you.
To our young women: The world needs you, women who are glad they are women, confident in their equal dignity, but secure in recognizing the differences between men and women. Women who embrace the gift of motherhood (whether spiritual or biological) as intrinsic to who they are. Women who are strong, tender, and attentive to the needs of others. Every woman is created with a space under her heart for another human being – a room for another—a tangible sign and reminder to all of us that human beings will find true fulfillment only in the gift of ourselves to others. The world needs women who take seriously the call of Pope St. John Paul II in Christifideles Laici for women to not only bring dignity to the conjugal life and motherhood, but also to take on the task of shaping the moral dimension of culture. The world needs virtuous women. We need you.
And a final point, a story really.
Graduates –I have no doubt that you will do great things, in your chosen professions and for the Church, and you may even get to know—or be—very important people.
In Washington, DC, where we’re from, the most common question people ask is “what do you do?” Often what they really want to know is “who do you know?”
The world has a way of measuring, evaluating you for what you produce, the achievements you stack up, and who you know.
My husband, over the course of his career, met and worked with some of the most important people in the world: Presidents, philanthropists, and princes; human rights leaders like Elie Wiesel and the Dali Lama; and even saints like our beloved St. John Paul II and St. Mother Teresa.
But over the course of his life, the combined impact on him of all those powerful people pales in comparison to The Person he met on a Florida beach when he was 14.
He was on a family trip with his parents – he was an only child – grateful, as he tells it, to finally get an hour on the beach by himself, because he had high hopes of meeting some cute girls. He sets himself up on a towel and tries to look cool (admittedly a difficult task on a Florida beach when you are a skinny fourteen-year-old, with fluorescent white-Irish skin, freckles, and an unruly mop of black hair).
He’s sitting there and along comes a small group of hippies known as “Jesus people.” (This was the early 70s.) The leader, uninvited, sat down beside him, and got right to the point.
He asked him “Do you know the Lord?”
My husband, a practicing Catholic but for whom the faith had yet to come alive, sized up these hippies and thought the fastest way to get rid of them—and to salvage his hopes of meeting cute girls—would be to say yes.
So, he said, “Sure,” he said. “I know the Lord.”
There was a pause as the hippie looked him up and down and said, “Are you sure?”
A little annoyed, as this was not going according to plan, my husband doubled down: “Sure, I know the Lord, He’s great.”
Another pause. And the hippie evangelist said,
“Well, just to be sure, can we pray with you?”
At that point, my husband gave up. He thought, “It’s hopeless. I’ve already lost my cool factor anyway. Maybe this will get rid of them.”
And for the next ten minutes, those Jesus people prayed with him on that beach, and he experienced an opening of his heart in a powerful way:
God the Father suddenly became his Father. Jesus the Lord became his Lord.
And when those Jesus people left him on that sandy towel, he was profoundly changed. His heart had been powerfully moved by the love of Christ.
He didn’t become a saint overnight – and certainly we are both sinners, still very much works in progress.
But my husband, Seamus, has talked to that person he met at the beach—Jesus Christ —every day of his life since then. That friendship with God, that daily conversation, that love relationship, guided him towards his vision to defend religious liberty for all, in accord with Dignitatis Humanae, the teaching that every person has the duty to seek God, but conscience can never be coerced. It was this friendship with Jesus Christ that led him to found a law firm, the Becket Fund for religious liberty, and litigate on behalf of the Catholic Church and religious believers for many years.
At 41, in the throes of raising a big family and the high stakes early years of the Becket Fund, my husband was stricken with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. He persevered and continued to do great things in the world, until he couldn’t.
Now, likely in the twilight of life—He is fully disabled, confined to a bed, his eloquent voice barely a whisper—he serves our family, and the Church, in a different, more powerful way, with his constant prayers and the continuous offering of his daily suffering. It is hard. But he is a deeply happy man, always accompanied by that friend he met on the beach so long ago. Life is good. God is good.
Our parting message to you: Love God, and love the life He gives you, with all its twists and turns, in darkness and in light.
Know who you are, not just what you do. Begin every day of your life—when the sun rises—by turning your heart to the Lord, with a few simple words:
Lord, I love you. Thank you for this day. Let me serve you, as you will.
And then, in the words of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, to the servants at Cana: “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5).
Congratulations again, and may God guide you and bless you in the adventure ahead.
Mary Rice Hasson, J.D., is the Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where she co-founded and directs the Person and Identity Project, an initiative that educates and equips parents and faith-based institutions to promote the truth about the human person and counter gender ideology.
