By RICHARD BORDELON
STAFF WRITER

The Fordham community came together “to celebrate Mass as a family,” Brandon Vazquez, GSB ’13, said Friday evening at the start of the University’s annual tradition that is the Baccalaureate Mass. 

The Class of 2013 and their families gathered faculty and staff to enjoy a Mass as a community, which is at the “heart of what makes our Catholic Jesuit university great,” Vazquez continued.

Vazquez gave the introduction to the Mass, which focused on the Jesuit motto Ad majorem Dei gloriam, “for the greater glory of God.” He reminded the students, “As we move on in our lives, we do so for the greater glory of God.”

Rev. Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of the University, was the principal celebrant. Rev. Philip A. Florio, S.J. was the homilist. The Fordham University Band and Orchestra and the Fordham Baccalaureate Choir provided the musical accompaniment, featuring traditional music by Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Florio’s homily began with the example of Fordham Compliments, a popular Facebook page among students.  He praised it for the many thanks and good words that have peppered its wall, but then connected it to a clear message that he had for the graduates: once a Ram, always a Ram.

He then discussed how the community “looks out for one another” and praised the community for always trying “to find God in all things.” “St. Ignatius of Loyola would be proud of you,” he said.  After lauding the graduates for the way they cared not only for one another and Fordham but also for the greater Bronx and New York community, Florio quoted St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order: “Love ought to be made in deeds more so than words.” 

To echo the theme of the Gospel, in which Jesus repeatedly tells Peter to tend and feed his flock and to follow him. When we follow Jesus, “we may doubt ourselves,” Florio said, “but God never doubts us.” Florio emphasized that no matter what challenges in the future you may face, you should never doubt yourself because “You are never alone.”

In order to emphasize his point, he told the story of a girl who, after visiting her father at work in Mahattan, took the Subway home by herself at the behest of her father.  When she got off the platform at her home stop, her mother was standing on the platform, and her father stepped out of the next car.  Florio repeated, “You are never, ever alone.”

After the Eucharistic Prayer and the distribution of Communion, AnnaMaria Shaker, FCRH ’13, offered some words of reflection. 

She reminded that when the graduates started Fordham as freshmen, McShane emphasized that they should be bothered with the problems in the world.  “Fordham taught me,” Shaker said, “the value and how-to of love.”  With this love that Fordham and its community has given its students, she urged the graduates to accept the “invitation to embrace challenges” and to take this love and bring it into “a world that needs to be transformed.”

McShane concluded the Mass with a special blessing of the graduates and their parents, and the liturgical ministers along with the celebrants and concelebrants processed out to the strains of “O God Beyond All Praising,” ready to celebrate Commencement.

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