Pomp, Circumstance, and Unsolicited Advice (Ignatius Press, 2025) brings together two dozen commencement addresses and university lectures, given since the turn of the century, from George Weigel. These addresses and lectures, given in academic settings, are both robust and accessible. They are meant to challenge hearers and readers to better appreciate the true nature of learning and to better understand the foundational truths of a great tradition.
Mr. Weigel recently corresponded with CWR about the book, the serious problems in many elite universities today, the relationship between faith and reason, and some intellectual giants of the past couple of centuries.
CWR: Commencement addresses are often forgettable, or they are memorable for the wrong reasons. How did you go about selecting the commencement addresses in this volume? And what sort of criteria—what to include, to avoid—do you use when composing a commencement address?
Weigel: A commencement address should not be pulled out of a file marked “generic commencement address”. It should reflect the distinctive situation of the school from which the graduates are graduating. That would be Rule #1.
Then a dollop of humor, some reflections on the challenges of the moment for missionary discipleship, and sincere thanks to the graduates’ parents, who often get ignored.
I hope the commencement addresses in my book, which were given in a variety of academic environments—all Catholic, but given across a diverse landscape, running from Eastern Europe to Cajun country to the Rockies—exhibit those qualities.
CWR: As you note in the Preface, there is an implosion happening in many formerly elite universities. What are some of the causes? And how do your essays in this volume address some of the essential problems and solutions?
Weigel: I think I addressed the root cause—pardon the phrase!—of “elite” degeneration in that preface: the loss of grip on the notion of truth, which President Drew Faust of Harvard said at her inauguration was an “aspiration,” not a “possession”
Yet the entire university enterprise as we understand it today was begun by Catholics in the 13th century who believed they were in “possession” of truths known from both revelation and reason—not truths to be buried in the sand, but truths to be received as a gift and then deployed in further searches for the truth of things.
When there is only “your” truth and “my “truth, and nothing that we both recognize as the truth, what do you get? You get over-privileged anti-Semites raving on “elite” campuses. I hope they’ve figured that out at Harvard and elsewhere, but I have my doubts: the worship of skepticism is deep in the DNA of the 21st-century academic establishment.
CWR: What are some of your most memorable commencement addresses or lectures, in terms of both the addresses and the circumstances?
Weigel: Six months after I gave the commencement address at the Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv and challenged its graduates to be true to the heritage of the 20th century martyrs of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, many of those students took their lives into their hands to protest encroaching authoritarianism during the 2013-14 Maidan Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv. I was deeply touched by that. As I was in giving the commencement address at my daughter’s graduation from the University of Dallas and my grandson’s high school graduation in Raleigh, in both of which I drew on my personal experience of Pope St. John Paul II.
CWR: Is it accurate to say that most, if not all, of the addresses in this volume focus on truth and the relationship between faith and reason? What are some of the points that you find yourself returning to when it comes to these important topics?
Weigel: Yes, most of them do touch on that, and I hope that’s not because of any lack of creativity or imagination on my part, but because I think that relationship is essential to rescuing Western civilization from its present Gadarene rush over the cliff of wokery.
Reason purifies faith so that faith never decomposes into superstition. Faith challenges reason to open the aperture of its concerns and not to settle for mucking around with the Little Questions, but rather to get to grips with the Big Questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? How do I discern truth in a world of mendacity? What makes for a worthy life?
CWR: In a 2018 lecture given in Poland, you focus on John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor. Why does that encyclical continue to be so important? And do you think that Pope Leo, in some manner, will need to affirm the strong points made by John Paul II about truth, intrinsic evil, conscience, and related matters?
Weigel: Deconstructing Veritatis Splendor and that great encyclical’s insistence on certain fixed moral truths we ignore at our peril was a major project of more than a few forces in the pontificate just ended.
In a world hemorrhaging blood from the catastrophic effects of relativism born of nihilism and skepticism, someone has to stand up for the fact that some things are good and life-giving, period, and some things are wicked and death-dealing, period. Normal people intuitively grasp that.
It takes a certain kind of academic stupidity to twist your mind around to the point where you try to argue that there are no “intrinsically evil” acts: What about rape? The torture of children? Genocide? C’mon, moral theology guild—get serious!
The Church is the last great institutional defender of humanity’s capacity to grasp the truth of things, including the moral truth of things, and I very much hope Pope Leo XIV follows the example of his noble namesake, Leo XIII, and reasserts that.
CWR: It’s striking that the five essays under the descriptive “Men of Genius” are a Polish philosopher and pope, a German theologian and pope, a French convert and cardinal, an English convert and cardinal, and an American theologian who went from progressive to conservative. What are some common attributes among those men? And what interests you about them and their thought?
Weigel: Karol Wojtyła, Joseph Ratzinger, Jean-Marie Lustiger, John Henry Newman, and Michael Novak were all first-class thinkers who stayed open to new questions and insights throughout the entirety of their lives.
Their intense and relentless curiosity—their determination never to settle for intellectually shoddy goods—was and is an inspiration: one that, in four cases, I had the great good fortune to experience personally.
CWR: What do you hope readers will gain and more deeply appreciate in reading these essays?
Weigel: A sense that the life of the mind can be fun.
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Weigel highlights VERITATIS SPLENDOR and moral absolutes so foundational to human nature and, therefore, to the Catholic Social Teaching (CST). An urgent challenge to the Land O’Lakes contingent is what else might be unpacked from the CST for the lives of nations and states?
Consider the post-colonial world where the “nation-state” idiom is ONLY ONE ARTIFACT OF “MODERNITY.” What of communally divided or “multinational states” delineated during the colonial era; and “multi-state nations” (!)—especially resurgent Islam’s ummah spanning the globe from Morocco to the southern Philippines?
In this spectrum of mostly non-Western cases, what specifically does natural law and the Catholic Church have to offer in terms of not only inviolable moral absolutes, but also application of the universal moral virtues of courage, temperance, justice—and especially prudential judgment? Different than a theological cookbook—and relevant to “modernity” in whatever stage or form—the CST might articulate the Common Good, on-the-ground, through lenses that are both complementary and in tension…
CENTERED on the “transcendent dignity of each human person” (Veritatis Splendor), we also have in CST: (1) the transcendent human person AND the family, always together, (2) wider Solidarity AND concrete Subsidiarity always together, (3) rights AND responsibilities always together, (4) informed conscience AND faithful citizenship always together, (5) the option for the poor AND the dignity of work always together, and (6) all of these AND sustainable care for God’s finite and ecologically complex gameboard, always together. The entire “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church” (2004) in a nutshell!
RIDDLE: Now with the clarity and tone of Pope Leo XIV, how for the distinct “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium) and the interrelated “ecclesial assemblies” (not “synods”) and Academia, both together, to get on with it–in season and out of season?