Magdalen College in the News

New Hampshire Sunday News – Magdalen College graduation emphasizes helping others

May 8, 2006 issue

BY TODD MORRISON

WARNER – For many, college graduation is synonymous with the song “Pomp and Circumstance” and making raucous gestures of victory from the commencement platform.

Others, like the one held yesterday morning at the chapel on the campus of Magdalen College, are quieter, more modest affairs, stepped in religious tradition and punctuated by a rich chorus or voices from the balcony.

One of the graduates, 22-year-old Myles Ahearn, said he came to the Catholic school four years ago in large part because of the school’s use of the Socratic Method of teaching, instead of traditional lectures. 

“It’s not a regular kind of school,” said Ahearn of Hammond, Ind.  “That really attracted me.”  Both his older brother and  his older sister also attended Magdalen, he said.

Yesterday, the small liberal arts college tucked away in the woods outside Warner graduated 18 seniors in a 90-minute ceremony that included Holy Communion and a homily by Bishop Joseph N. Perry of Chicago.

Ahearn called a baccalaureate Mass a fitting way to combine “faith and life.”

In his speech, Perry spoke of the importance of helping others, using the example of washing another’s feet, a recurring theme throughout the Bible as being the ultimate gesture of humility. 

Holiness, he said, was attained through actively engaging the world through Christian acts, “not in splendid isolation from others.”

Founded in 1973, the college of about 120 students also offers Vatican-authorized Apostolic Catechetical diplomas, which allow the recipient to teach Catholic beliefs in schools and other places.  That additional diploma is pursued in conjunction with the undergraduate degree the school offers.

But as eloquent and understated as the baccalaureate Mass was, the after-party was as loud and frenetic as any other post-ceremony party, with graduates, friends and family members chatting and taking pictures. 

And soon they will go their own ways.

One of Ahearn’s classmates, 21-year-old Sandee Marte of Queens, N.Y., will be heading off this summer to work in a mission in Central America possibly Argentina.

“It’s bittersweet,” she said about leaving her classmates behind.  “We’re going out into the world.”