REGIS

Mass of the Holy Spirit & Academic Convocation
Remarks by James P. Kelly ‘71, Editor, TIME Magazine - September 5, 2003
I did not know anybody here, and I was certain no one wanted to know
me. I had a terrible first quarter, flunking Latin and Math; to this day, I
remember my homeroom teacher, Mr. Connelly, giving me a sharp look
of disapproval as he handed me my first report card. I was pretty sure
I would flunk out by the end of my first year, a fate that struck me as
about the most shameful thing that could happen, not only to me but to
my mother, for whom a Regis education was
the next best thing to joining the priesthood. I
was also somehow sure that if I flunked out of
Regis I would not get into a good college and
would be unemployed the rest of my life.
As you can see, I was a fretful teen…
I have no idea how many of you had these
worries when you started here, or have them
today, in fact, since for many of you this is
your first week at Regis. But I bring you great
news: these worries do pass, and you will be a
success, at least as measured by a resume. Being
in such an intimidating place as Regis can
sometimes obscure the fact that you are gifted,
you actually are smarter and more talented
than most people, and that whether you end
up first in your class or last in your class here,
you’ve gotten a better education than most
people get and you have the native intelligence to find out what you want
to do with your life and do it reasonably well. I know I sound like one of
those pitchmen on late night TV who promise to show you how to make
a million dollars in real estate overnight, but I do believe that if all of you
work hard, all of you will do well. After all, you got into Regis.
Now for the more sobering news. Doing well is not the same thing as
doing good, and alas there is no guarantee that any of us will always
do good. And by doing good I mean living a moral life, a life not just
of treating others the way you would like to be treated, but of doing the
right thing, even if it means becoming unpopular or hurting the feelings
of others for a larger cause.
And one reason why I cannot safely predict we all would do the right
thing is that we cannot predict what situation we might suddenly find
ourselves in that requires a moral choice. One of the most important
choices I face each year at TIME is picking the Person of the Year,
and almost always it is a titan of politics or business or world affairs, a
George Bush, a Rudolph Guiliani, a Bill Clinton, a Ted Turner, a Mikhail
Gorbachev. But last year I picked three little known women, Coleen
Rowley of the FBI, Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom, and Sherron Watkins
of Enron. All worked for very big outfits, all were successful, and all
loved their jobs and their immediate co-workers. And all saw something
very wrong going on that led them to blow the whistle, in the process
upending their lives and the lives of their families and co-workers.
In retrospect, of course, it looks like a relatively easy decision for them:
tell your boss something is very wrong, and end up on the cover of TIME
as Whistleblower of the Year, with book contracts and speech fees and
righteous fame. Except that they did not know any of this would happen
when they showed the courage they did, and frankly life has not gone that
well for Coleen Rowley of the FBI, whose fame has not stood her in good
stead in the FBI but has chosen to remain there rather than cashing in.
Jim Kelly ‘71 outside St. Ignatius Loyola
with John Connelly ‘56
You may never be confronted with a case of national security that you
feel is being bungled, as Coleen Rowley did, and you may never face
a case of cooked accounting books, as Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom
did, or a case of executive lying, as Sherron Watkins of Enron did. But I
would be very surprised if you never faced a situation where standing up
for what you believed was right might blemish your resume, or cost you
some friends, or give you the reputation of not
being a team player.
You see, this is the tricky part of living a moral
life. On the one hand, you want to do your part as
a member of the community; on the other hand,
sometimes doing what is right means you will
have to stand apart from the community, because
what you believe is not popular. But in your heart
you feel you are doing the right thing, that you are
following your own moral compass despite all the
signs around you pointing in a different direction.
I owe a great deal to Regis; this school, along
with my parents, has had more influence on me
than anything else in my life. If I had to sum up
the most valuable lesson I learned here, it would
be that intellectually and spiritually, you must
be comfortable with yourself, that to follow the
crowd and to strive to fit in is ultimately self-defeating because you never
discover for yourself what is worth believing in.
This is easier said than done, especially for a teenager. We want to be
liked, we want to be popular, and the pressure to conform can be excruciating.
But I know you will make a mistake if you let the desire to be
socially popular lead you into going along with the crowd, to accept other
people’s views uncritically and not to think for yourself. And by thinking
for yourself, and thinking in a humanistic way, you will find yourself doing
the right thing, no matter what the circumstances.
There is a popular phrase among born-again Christians that you
may have heard of: What Would Jesus Do? This has been boiled
down to its acronym –WWJD- and had been made into buttons
and bumper stickers and T-shirts. A few months ago, it even got
turned into What Would Jesus Drive?, a not entirely tongue in cheek
campaign about whether you should drive an SUV. But it is not a
bad construct for the more important decisions you face in life; in
fact, one could argue that Jesus was the ultimate whistleblower.
But the Jesus of the What Would Jesus Do movement is not always the
Jesus I have come to embrace. One of the best books I read at Regis was a
small paperback called “Your God is Too Small”, which dared to suggest
that God is not a wrathful presence but a loving, understanding one. And
it is that compassion, which I first learned here at Regis, that is missing
from so much of our public debate today. The Ann Coulters and Al Frankens
of the world certainly believe in something, and they believe in it
loudly, but I only wish they showed more of the generosity of spirit that
marks the Collen Rowleys of the world.
You learn many things at Regis, but let me suggest that one of the most
important things you learn is what it means to be a person of character.
Now, character is one of those all-purpose words that are used so often
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