“Men on a Mission”
On the morning of Sunday, May 31—the day that would have been Gonzaga’s 199th Commencement Ceremony—the Class of 2020 and their families, teachers, and friends tuned into Facebook to watch a Virtual Mass and Celebration in their honor. Printed on these two pages is Gonzaga President Father Stephen Planning’s homily on that bittersweet occasion.
Father Planning addressing the Class of 2020 from Our Lady’s Chapel.
“G
raduates of the Class of 2020, you don’t need me to tell you that you are graduating in a time of great adversity. Every day the news is filled with stories of the challenges all around us. Our country, and indeed our world, is facing some of the greatest challenges we have ever faced in modern times. This is indeed a time of extraordinary adversity. While people have used many adjectives to describe the difficulties that we are going through, the one adjective that I do not agree with is ‘unprecedented.’ While the challenges that face us are unique to this time, Class of 2020, you are not
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alone among your fellow Eagles for graduating in a time of great adversity. Next year, our school will celebrate its bicentennial. When you look over the extraordinary expanse of our school’s existence, you will see multiple examples of Gonzaga students graduating during times of tremendous adversity and facing uncertain futures. In the hallway outside my office, you can see photos of our students that date back to the 1800s. In those days, Gonzaga had a Cadet Corps. There are photos on the walls of our Eagles in their Civil War era cadet uniforms lined up in formation.
During the first half of the 1860s, many of our graduates found themselves at war with their own former citizens in a country that had been ripped apart. It’s hard to imagine this kind of adversity today. The beginning of the 20th century found our graduates confronting both the First World War and the global influenza pandemic of 1918, an illness which in the course of one year would claim almost 600,000 American lives. During the early 1930s, our graduates found themselves leaving Eye Street and stepping out into a world ravaged by the Great Depression. In the late 1960s, the neighborhood around Gonzaga would explode from the race riots resulting after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The graduates of that era found themselves entering a world of civil unrest, cultural upheaval, and the Vietnam War. Class of 2020, you are not alone in graduating during a time of great adversity. Some of the greatest examples of our Eagles graduating during one of the most extraordinary times of adversity are found among our alumni who graduated during the Second World War. I hold in my hands the yearbook from the Class of 1943. The very first pictures you see inside the yearbook are not of student life, but rather of the war that marked this class’s entire time at Gonzaga. The forward to the yearbook is deeply moving. In it, the senior class recounts what it was like to have their four years of high school completely overshadowed by one of the greatest wars in history. Within eight days of starting their freshman year in 1939, the war in Europe had begun with England and France declaring war on Germany. By the fall of their junior year, the United States was at war. In their yearbook, the seniors write, ‘On
