April (with its showers sweet) gave us two powerful reminders of our mission as faculty, staff, and students in the St. Norbert College Honors Program. First, son of the Upper Midwest Pope Leo XIV took a firm and critical stand against the violence of ongoing wars that threaten peace and human lives across the globe. Second, Deputy Director of the United Nations Foundation and SNC Honors Program alumnus Bojan Francuz returned to Green Bay to deliver a Great Decisions lecture on the importance of respect for international law and the urgency of diplomacy as a means for resolving global conflicts.
These developments remind us that our institution is named for a saint who was famous for his ability to bring warring parties together in reconciliation. As members of the St. Norbert College community, we are educated in many aspects of the life of St. Norbert of Xanten, but his life-long efforts to bring peace where none seemed possible are perhaps most impressive and probably most overlooked.
Peace is not simply the absence of conflict, and peacemaking is a real superpower. It requires not only a transcendent spiritual and moral instinct, but also the wisdom to know when we are being goaded into conflict by those with subversive intent and the intelligence to know the difference between bad arguments for war and good arguments for peace. All of these have in common that we are required to rise up out of the weeds of our imminent personal concerns and see our communities, from the local to the global, as relational structures anchored in the dignity of individual persons and their universal interests.
This sets the agenda for Honors students: to develop the intellect in pursuit of peace and reconciliation and to seek the wisdom required to achieve it. It is our responsibility to see through the squabbling and cheap point-scoring of media “discourse” and locate the core ethical principles that illuminate the way forward. We have the lamps; it is our responsibility to lead the way out of darkness.
In the current moment, as college students, you will not be immediately impacting wars in the Middle East or Eastern Europe nor managing tensions in East Asia. But someday you may well be. Until then, you can practice peace. You can approach your friends and peers with the faith, hope, and love that repels pessimism and apathy. You can practice rising above the fray of petty enmities to light the way toward friendship and compassion and…a better world?
