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“No Other End than the Truth Itself”

 

by Rev. Luke J. Mata, Ph.D.
Prelature of Opus Dei
Baccalaureate Mass of the Holy Spirit
Commencement 2026
51����, California

 

There is a line from the founding president of this college that I suspect many of you have heard so often during your years here, it has become like the school’s heartbeat. Yet I want you to hear it today, as if for the first time, because I think it contains something that is only now, at this moment of completion and sending forth, ready to be fully understood:

“Liberal education, as we have understood it, is the cultivation of the mind with no other end than the truth itself.”

No other end than the truth itself. What that phrase reveals is precisely what sets 51���� apart from most other institutions of higher learning. Dr. McArthur’s statement implies a fundamental question ignored by many in academia today: What is truth?

I. Truth Is a Person

When Pilate asked that question — Quid est veritas? — he was standing three feet from the Answer and didn’t recognize it. Sadly, he meant it as a dismissal: There is no answer, so why are we talking about this? And the Answer said nothing, because the Answer was standing right there, bound and silent before him.

My friends, truth is not an abstraction. Truth is not a collection of correct propositions. Truth is not the sum of the Great Books; however great they may be. Truth is a Person, and His name is Jesus.

He says it himself: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Truth stood up in today’s Gospel and cried out — Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.

This means that Dr. McArthur’s phrase, “no other end than the truth itself,” is, at bottom, a Christological statement. The end of your education is not an insight, not a degree. The end of your education is a Person. A 51���� education is to encounter and cultivate a relationship with the Incarnate Truth, Jesus Christ.

II. The Greatest Truth He Revealed

Dear graduates, during your years here, you have asked yourselves what is the most important truth that Jesus taught.

Jesus revealed many things, of course. But the deepest, the most astonishing truth — the one no philosopher ever arrived at because reason alone could never have reached it — is this: God is not solitude. God is communion. God is Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One God, three Persons, each in an eternal relationship of self-giving love with the other two. This is the revelation at the heart of Christianity.

Notice how perfectly the readings today move through all three Persons. The Father speaks in Isaiah, placing His spirit upon His servant. The Son cries out in the Gospel, promising rivers of living water. The Spirit descends in Acts, falling upon the believers in Samaria. Father, Son, and Spirit — each present, each distinct, all in perfect unity. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a mystery to be entered and lived.

III. Not Just to Know, but to Love

This brings me to what I most want to say to you today. 51���� did not simply educate you. It formed you. Education fills the mind. Formation shapes the whole person — intellect, will, desires, and loves. The entire structure of this college — the Mass at its center, the seminar table as its method, daily prayer as its rhythm — was designed to do something no curriculum alone can do. It was designed to teach you to love the truth.

And if truth is a Person — if truth is finally the Trinitarian God revealed in Jesus Christ — then to love the truth means to love Him. To develop a personal relationship not just with an idea but with each one of the three divine Persons. To know and love the Father is to rest in the certainty of being loved into existence — to know yourself not as a student or a project but as a beloved child. To know the Son is to encounter truth in the flesh — truth that walked, that wept, that stood silent before Pilate, that cried out from the Cross, that wants to be your friend. To know the Holy Spirit — the one the Alleluia invokes, Emitte spiritum tuum — is to know the love between Father and Son as a Person, the teacher Augustine called the magister interior.

Let me say a word now about our relationship with God the Father.

The reality of our divine filiation is, in my view, the second most important truth revealed by Christ. Baptism makes us children of God. The Father loves me infinitely and unconditionally. We can, we should, we need to trust Him completely.

IV. Scattered, but Not Lost

The Acts of the Apostles tells us that the community was scattered after the persecution — and the scattered ones went about preaching the Word. The scattering that looked like destruction became the means of mission.

You are being scattered today. You are leaving this college, this chapel, this community. And the Church’s question at this moment is this: Will you bring Him with you?

Isaiah’s Servant is your model. He does not shout. He does not break the bruised reed or quench the smoldering wick. This is someone so genuinely in love with the truth that he has nothing to prove. He can sit with the fragile, the half-convinced, the person smoldering but not yet fully alight, and tend that small flame with patience. That gentleness is the fruit of knowing the Father Who holds all things, of imitating the Son Who wept, of trusting the Spirit Who has been working in human hearts since before the world began.

V. The Mother who Asks

To conclude, I want to introduce you to a trustworthy guide for the journey ahead. Or rather — she has been with you all along. This very chapel is named after her: Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity. The Church has given her a title that could have been coined for this very place: Sedes Sapientiae, the Seat of Wisdom. Mary is the Seat of Wisdom because Wisdom Himself once sat in her arms. She held in her lap the one who said I am the Truth.

And she is your mother. The last act of Jesus before dying on the Cross was to give us His mother to be our mother. It is crazy but true.

At Cana, when the wine ran low, Mary alone noticed, and she acted. She went to her Son, and said simply: “They have no wine.” And she turned to the servants with a calm authority that only a mother has: “Do whatever He tells you.” She persuaded the Truth to perform His first miracle, through the power of a mother’s love and intercession.

Bring your needs to her. She will do what she did at Cana. She will bring those needs to her Son. And he will act, because Jesus cannot say “no” to his mother.

Go forth from this college knowing what you know.

Go in the love of the Father, Who knew you before you were formed in the womb.

Go in the truth of the Son, Who called out to you by name.

Go in the fire of the Spirit, Who has been renewing the face of the earth since before the beginning.

And go with Mary, the mother of Jesus and your mother, walking beside you — who will bring you to her Son, again and again, for the rest of your lives, until the wine of this world runs out and the eternal wedding feast begins.

 

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