Father Byron Address

Commitment, Commencement, & Mother’s Day REMARKS of Rev. William J. Byron, SJ

To the Graduating Class of Mount Aloysius College May 7, 2011

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Commitment, Commencement, & Mother’s Day REMARKS of Rev. William J. Byron, SJ To the Graduating Class of Mount Aloysius College May 7, 2011

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hank you all very much.

And thank you, President Foley for that demonstration of your creative writing abilities as reflected in your introduction of me. It’s really a pleasure and an honor for me to be here, but I also want to thank President Tom Foley, who’s a longtime friend, for inviting me here. I also want to congratulate

Phyllis Bonanno and Donato Zucco, you’ll be hearing more about them when their honorary degrees are conferred. Now, in this learned environment I paged through the program and I saw those cum laudes and magna cum laudes and summa cum laudes and awards and honors. And in interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you that when I was in college I was part of that allimportant bottom half of the class that made the top half possible.

So why don’t we hear it for the bottom half of this class. Well deserved.

As you are all aware tomorrow is Mother’s Day. So, a special word of congratulations to you proud mothers and to those of you who are graduating who are, yourselves, mothers. We congratulate as well all the fathers, the grandparents, the spouses, the brothers, sisters and relatives, but a special salute, a special salute, to all the mothers in our midst today.

Early days in Philadelphia

And because Mother’s Day is upon us, let me take a few moments of personal privilege and organize my remarks to you around the notion of commitment prompted by my memories of the admirable commitment that characterized the person of the great lady I called Mother—my own mother who died at age 82 back in 1977.

She embodied commitment, as I’ll explain a little more fully in a moment or two. She grew up in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, hometown of your Professor Tom Coakley’s father. Dr. Coakley’s grandmother and my mother

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were first cousins, so there’s a link here, and his dad was my older second cousin, Tommy, who I really admired. A great, great man, a great football player, and you know, when you’re a little kid you always admire the guy who’s a good football player. But if you played football in Shenandoah— the field there had more coal slate on it than grass—so you really had to be tough.

It’s a small town in the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania, and my mother, when she left Shenandoah to go to college, went to Trinity College in Washington, D.C. and graduated from Trinity in 1918. The arithmetic is going to become significant as this story goes on. And after graduating from Trinity, she went to Philadelphia—the big town— and she worked on a newspaper that no longer exists called The North American. She was a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia where she met and married my father who came right out of high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts to go to Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. You could go right out of high school, take one year of pre-med at the Medical College then do four years. That was common in those days. And my father became a physician at age 22.

My parents settled in Connellsville, Pennsylvania. I have to say that the geography of all of this came to my mind when Tom Foley invited me to come to be your speaker today. To think of this beautiful area of Pennsylvania, with your rolling

Father William J. Byron, SJ, with his mother, 1952 hills, takes my imagination back to Shenandoah and then out to Connellsville and Southwestern Pennsylvania. So my parents moved there, bought a home, started a family as my father joined a family practice. Sadly, my father died shortly thereafter of an illness that would take no one’s life now. They simply did not have the antibiotics then,

1928, that would have saved his life. So he left my mother with two babies, my brother aged twoand-a-half and me, aged seven months.

My mother’s name was Mary Isabelle Langton. Everyone called her Polly, the poll-parrot nickname she acquired from her endless childhood chatter with patients in her father’s waiting

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room. Her father was what they then called a general physician and surgeon, the town doctor in that coal mining town.

Polly Langton-Byron was an attractive young woman when she became a widow ten years after she graduated from college. I can remember hearing older relatives speculate about whether Polly

would remarry, and I have to tell you that that kind of speculation never bothered me as it would bother, and has bothered, other youngsters. I never knew my father. I had never been able to be attached to him. I was only seven months old when he died.

In any case, there were no indications that she was even

thinking about remarrying and she returned to Philadelphia and established a home for two young boys. As I said, my father died in 1928. The stock market crash that you’ve read about in the history books came in 1929, ushering in the Great Depression that you’ve read and heard about in history classes. The recent recession, the Great Recession as we’re calling it here in America, which was experienced during your collegiate years, that really was a minor inconvenience for the nation compared to what Americans had to endure through the 1930s.

The national unemployment rate was 25 percent, the bread lines were long, jobs were scarce, and hardship was everywhere.

My mother waited until I entered the first grade in 1933, and my brother was already in school two years ahead of me, when she decided to go back to work. And when she did, it was not to go back into the newspaper world where things were less secure.

Instead she took a job with a federal agency that was called the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation set up as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to assist those who, without federal help, would default on their mortgages and lose their homes. We really could have used something like the HOLC over the last couple of years here in America.

Mary Isabelle (Polly) Langton

My mother, of course, wanted job security. The uncertainty of private sector newspaper work represented an employment risk that she could not afford to take. Now, we had a good life, my mother, my brother

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and I along with my mother’s unmarried sister who was a nurse. She lived with us in Philadelphia as she went to medical school. I personally experienced no hardships or deprivations. I can remember as a kid of about eight years old asking my mother whether I was using too much electricity by listening to baseball games on the radio during the summer. Nobody was ever bugging me about turning out the lights and that sort of thing, but it was a different era. I remember in elementary school seeing a boy in front of me fall out of the desk.

He was hungry. As I say, I had no real personal hardships, but life was different in those days and times were hard.

The Home Owner’s Loan Corporation had a sunset provision so it closed down after saving millions of homeowners from foreclosures. With that closure my mother transferred to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and later to the Veterans Administration in her career as a civil servant. No real glamour, like the newspaper stuff, but she had a career, she had job security and she had her priorities lined up. She had to take care of those two little kids. And off she went to work every morning and was back in the evening to be both mother and father for the boys.

During the Second World War she gave up both of her sons for military service. My brother went to the Navy for three years, and me to the Army for 18 months. She prayed a lot, I’m sure. She was a woman of faith.

She prayed for our safety, neither

Polly Langton on her wedding day of us suffered in any way from military service overseas; my brother in the South Pacific, me in Germany. Both of us received veteran’s educational benefits, you probably heard of what they call the GI Bill. We received educational benefits so that we could go to college. And in my brother’s case not only college but medical school with all tuition paid by the federal government. Not a bad deal, and with a living allowance as well. The government paid your tuition, fees and books up to $500 a year. Princeton was high

price, it was $600. When I went to St. Joe’s College in Philadelphia, the clerk in the bookstore was throwing in extra pads and pencils to bring it up to that $500.

If you were single you got $75 a month living expenses and if you were married you got $120 each month.

My brother became a psychiatrist.

I became a Jesuit priest. And I’m sure you can understand, my mother was pleased and grateful and probably proud. Now, when she turned 70, she gave a letter to

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my brother to be opened when she died. And when that day came in 1977 my brother and I opened that letter, which began with these words, “it’s a beautiful, sunny, Sunday afternoon. I feel fine and I just turned 70 so I want to put a few things down on paper that I want you to attend to after I die.”

And then she had some small details about this piece of jewelry to this particular granddaughter, little particulars about her funeral and so on, and then she wrote, and I’m quoting, “that ring has been on my finger since your father put it there on our wedding day; I want that to go down with me in the cemetery in Shenandoah.”

Well, I got a lesson then about the meaning of commitment and it became clear to me why she never considered remarrying. Now, as a priest I want to assure you, I’ve often advised widows to remarry.

For many it is absolutely the best thing to do, for themselves and for their children. Often a dying spouse will urge the other spouse who they leave behind, to remarry. And that’s the way it ought to be in most cases. But in my mother’s case that was not the route that she wanted to take.

She had made a commitment.

She wanted to keep it, no matter what, as long as she lived. Hence the wedding ring went down with her.

I’m privileged to be able to tell you that story, a commitment

story, at this Commencement on this day before Mother’s Day. And I want to point out that it has relevance for you men as well. Commitment will be an important part of all your lives— each one of you— not just for you young women who may be called to motherhood.

Motherhood is, of course, a call to commitment but so is the call to fatherhood. So too is the call to whatever career will begin for you when this Commencement day is just a memory. Let me simply say that the uncommitted life is not worthy of you, graduates of Mount Aloysius College.

Each one of you has already formed some notion of the good life. You have goals. You have dreams. You want to be happy, of course, but you should reflect a bit today about your idea of happiness. Make sure that your idea of happiness includes a faith commitment to the God who is the source of your being, and all that you possess. Be committed to faith and family, acknowledging that in all likelihood there will be in God’s providence for you a commitment to another person with whom you will establish your own family. And some few of you will be called to the single life that will indeed be a full and satisfying life because it will involve the commitment to serve others. Let me suggest that the good life, the really good life for each one of you, is the life that is lived generously in the service of others. No matter what you do by occupational category, the good life is the life that is lived generously in the service of

others. It will take many forms and shapes. It will be long or short. It may indeed be rich or poor. But it’s bound together by the cord of commitment and it will, I assure you, be a happy life, thus bound to the extent that it is lived generously in the service of others.

Mount Aloysius College has prepared each one of you very well for life after college, for the good life, the really good life— because now you know how to live competently and generously in the service of others. Give thanks then to this College, the faculty, the staff, to all your classmates with whom you have been learning, one from another.

As you leave today, give thanks to the God who gave you life.

He gave you not only the gift of life, but His providence brought you here. That is and has been, and will always be a gift to you.

Give thanks to your mothers on Mother’s Day and give thanks to all who are here today to celebrate and make this day so special for you.

Congratulations one and all. §

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Father Byron receiving an honorary degree from President Tom Foley at the 2011 Commencement