Among the many distinguishing factors, mister Martin is the founder and chief executive officer of FOCUS, the fell the fellowship of Catholic University students.
An award winning and dynamic speaker, Curtis has the ability to help his audience discover a vision for life.
Whether he is on college campuses, on television, speaking at conferences, or working with core corporate America, Curtis engages people through humor, stories, and his own captivating experiences.
Please join me in honoring mister Curtis Martin for his contributions to the field of psychology and public witness to faith and reason in action.
Thank you, doctor Biss.
Your excellencies, father Sikorsky, reverend fathers, religious women and men, family and friends and loved ones of the graduates, and graduates, it's a tremendous honor to be with you.
It's a delight to have fallen into a friendship with this wonderful university and the institute that preceded it in our work and focus.
Over the last twenty years, we've worked with tens of thousands of college students, and we have a similar vision to help people flourish.
And that flourishing is an amazing work, and I'd like to speak briefly about that and, about the great synergy that I pray for as we move forward.
When I look at the flourishing of a person coming alive in Christ, we see a pattern that comes out.
Somebody who has already encountered Christ moves forward and steps into the life of somebody else.
But they have to address their poverty.
It might be physical.
It might be spiritual.
It might be emotional.
But if they don't address the poverty, they won't be able to hear the great richness of the gospel.
And so you begin to walk with them, and they begin to come alive.
And at a moment, they also encounter Christ.
And you recognize that the flourishing is not just a flourishing in this life, but a a flourishing that will last into eternity.
And then they begin to go out and do the same, to be able to love others because now they've been enriched.
So they love them in their poverty, meeting them where they are.
And an amazing thing takes place.
The process is repeated over and over again.
But what we've seen is that focused missionaries can offer friendship.
They can offer, a pathway back to the sacrifice of the church.
But we encounter people who themselves, in the process of becoming enriched, live in deep wounding.
And that is where your important work comes in so powerfully.
And I wanna I wanna congratulate you on that.
I also want to encourage you that, we're here to celebrate your effort, your gifts, your skills, which are still in process but are well on their way, And to celebrate this great milestone.
But it struck me as I was trying to prepare, to share something with you that I you're kind of in a similar place where I am.
I'm reading a book on the rosary.
It's the hundredth anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima.
And, in the history, came across something that, took place in Saint Dominic's life.
Dominic was the most gifted orator of his generation, but he was having only a little bit of fruitfulness in his work.
And our lady appeared to him and said, Dominic, you're gifted.
The problem is not in your gifting or your skills.
It's in the hearts and minds of the people you're speaking to.
You need grace.
And when God chose to enter into history in the most definitive way with the coming of Jesus Christ, it began with two words, hail Mary.
And he she then gave him the the rosary and said, if you will share the rosary and meditate and preach the mysteries, God will open the hearts and minds of the people you're trying to reach.
And so I would like to invite us to take just about three or four minutes right now to just pray one decade of the rosary together.
I'd like to invite us to pray about the Annunciation.
Because the Annunciation is very appropriate to where you are in your life today.
God intervened in humanity's life in a very powerful way, not a teaching.
The teachings are great, and there were teachings included, but in a presence.
I love to go to Nazareth.
It's one of my favorite places on earth.
I love to go to the church.
It's a two level church.
There's a big church up top, and there literally is a giant hole in the floor in the to look down into the crypt so that you can look at the front porch of the childhood home of the blessed Virgin Mary.
And there on the altar is an inscription.
It's quote scripture, but it adds one word.
It says the word was made flesh here.
And it's so powerful to recognize that Jesus did not teach us things only, but he came and he shared life with us.
It's amazing to see.
People say, well, did Jesus have to die for us?
And given the way that he revealed himself, it became necessary that the Christ would suffer and die.
Jesus says that himself.
But God's all powerful.
He didn't have to reveal things this way.
He could have just said, you're forgiven.
But But he didn't wanna forgive us in a cosmetic way.
In fact, the one person that he did that to, the blessed Virgin Mary, by the merits that would be won later, but when he but he gave those gifts to her first.
But it didn't free her from sin and suffering.
It invited her more deeply than anyone else into the suffering that her son would endure for our sake.
And you are walking the same path, not to step back and write prescriptions and throw them in a hole, but to walk with people, to hurt with them, and to walk them out.
And I think that's powerful.
So I'd like to invite you to pray this deck of the rosary, not just for yourselves, but for every single person that you are going to walk with during the rest of your time in the pursuits of psychology and your counseling.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
The Annunciation.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, hasty.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Oh, my Jesus, forgive us our sins.
Save us from the fires of hell.
Lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy.
An exciting time, and I believe that this university is perfectly positioned in an anointed sort of way.
You stand at a moment when piercing insights from the secular sciences are being shown into the very things you're studying.
There's been such wonderful advancements in in the secular studies, and that makes it a perfect time to be a Catholic.
Because what Catholics are best at is looking into the beauty, the truth, and the goodness in the rest of the world, and with the insight of the Holy Spirit, mining those truths, bringing them home so that they can find their true place.
To be able to recognize that context is everything, narrative is everything.
If you think about it, the world with all of these piercing insights has the narrative exactly backwards.
Let's look at the human person for just a moment, just in three aspects, our origin, our condition, and our destiny.
The world says that you and those that you'll be working with are glorified pond scum.
Your great great great great great grandparents were tadpoles or something like that.
You have no significant dignity.
In fact, in reality, when you look at the big bang, you have no significant dignity.
None at all.
You are really nothing.
The church on the other hand looks and says, you are a son or a daughter of God.
You are so infinitely valuable that you were conceived twice.
You were conceived once in the mind of God, and he loved the idea of you so much that you were conceived a second time in your mother's womb.
You're infinitely valuable, priceless beyond measure, of greater value than all of the rest of creation put together.
Amazing.
In origin, the world and the church could not think more differently about you and the people you'll be serving.
When you think about our condition, the world says you're basically good, and so give in to your impulses.
If you feel like you should do something, go for it.
The church says you're amazing, but you're broken.
You have these things called temptations, and you need to allow your intel impulses to be, measured by reason so that you can choose wisely to navigate life.
Again, the world and the church couldn't be a more different place, and we can see this played out over and over and over again.
And finally, in Destiny, the world says that when it's over, it's over.
End of end of the game.
And the church says, quoting or at least paraphrasing cardinal Newman, everyone who ever lived still does somewhere.
And we need to use this life to obtain that life.
Again, the world and the church could not be in more different places here.
And this is what's so important about your work because having piercing insights isn't enough to really bring about flourishing.
The meta narrative that you have is what's so important there.
I've watched one of your classmates, Sarah Acres, who I've worked with for more than ten years.
I've just watched her through this process, and she was amazing when she started, but she's just deepened in her humanity and her ability to care for others.
One of the beautiful statements about Cardinal that Cardinal Ratzinger said about being Catholic, he said, evangelization has as its end to address poverty in all of its forms.
But in order to address poverty, you have to allow God to enrich you.
So while there are wonderful, sincere people in your field, if they're working with a bad blueprint, a bad metanarrative, they'll never be able to help people flourish the way that you will.
Even the most sincere build sincere builder in the world can't build well with a bad blueprint.
You've been given this beautiful blueprint, and you'll be able to execute on it for years to come.
We live in a world that is broken.
Not too long ago, my my dear friend and mentor, Archbishop Shaphew, was speaking at, Notre Dame.
And he says this, listening to people's sexual sins in the sacrament of penance is hardly new news, but the scope, the novelty, the violence, and the compulsiveness of these sins are.
And remember that people who come to confession are already are coming with a sense of right and wrong.
They already understand, at least dimly, that they need to change and seek God in their lives.
The world is desperately broken, and I'd I'd like to leave you with just two thoughts of hope about this brokenness.
The first one is job security.
You're good.
The second one is that we should take note of what's going on in the world from the perspective of Christ.
It would it would be apparent as we listen to Saint John Paul, Pope Benedict, Pope Francis, and others who have deep insight into the signs of the times, that the devil himself is terrified and has never worked harder than he has working in this last century.
He's terrified that his kingdom is about to come to an end, and so he's pulled out all the stops, which means that you and I have been invited into a battle at one of its most epic moments.
I believe that your life right now will be the type of life that stands out amongst the generations.
There are a few of them that have walked before us.
That when you get to heaven, people will want to have dinner with you because they want to know what it was like.
One of those generations might have been the the generation with Moses.
What was it like?
What did manna taste like?
How high did the pillar of fire go up?
All these questions we wanna ask were those that were with Jesus.
And to be able to sit back and say, what was it like?
Were you at the Sermon on the Mount?
How much bread did you eat when he made the when he made all that bread?
How much wine did you drink when he made all that wine?
And to be able to sit and talk to people, and I believe that you have an opportunity, I have an opportunity, we have an opportunity to flourish at a moment of pivotal importance that'll be so dramatic as to bring about or to be brought about by the triumph of the Immaculate Heart.
And so I encourage you, sharpen your skills, be lifelong learners, never stop in that, but recognize that our work is primarily work of grace, so never stop begging heaven for the grace to bring about the healing that the people we work with so desperately need.
I'm so thrilled to be with you.
Congratulations.