TR First President to Speak at Catholic College

As the controversy rages over President Obama speaking at this year’s Notre Dame commencement, it may be a good moment to remember the first President to speak at a Catholic college’s commencement. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt spoke at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Here’s what he had to say:

AT HOLY CROSS COLLEGE, WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS, JUNE 21, 1905

Father, Bishop, Alumni of Holy Cross, and you, my Fellow-Citizens, men and women of Worcester, of Massachusetts:

It is a pleasure to me to be the guest of Holy Cross. It is eminently characteristic of your State, and of all our Nation, that we should have institutions of learning like this, in which the effort is constant to train not merely the body and mind, but the soul of the man, so that he may be a good American, a good citizen of our great country.

In this country of ours we are developing a new type of nationality, a type kin to each of the various Old World races from which in part it springs, and yet separate from all. Each stock that comes here can furnish something of permanent value to the country as a whole; and from each stock we have the right to expect the furnishing of that element. Here in Holy Cross College I want to say one word spoken I trust to ears willing to hear it. During the last three years I have happened, by chance, to grow particularly interested in the great subject of Celtic literature, and I feel it is not a creditable thing to the American Republic, which has in its citizenship so large a Celtic element, that we should leave it to the German scholars and students to be our instructors in Celtic literature. I want to see in Holy Cross, in Harvard, in all the other universities where we can get the chairs endowed, chairs for the study of Celtic literature. A century and over ago the civilized world, which had been looking down upon old Norse poetry as the production of a barbarous race, suddenly awoke to the wealth of beauty contained in the Scandinavian sagas. If I am not greatly in error we are now about to see a similar awakening to the wealth of beauty contained in the Celtic sagas; and I wish to see American institutions of higher learning take the lead in that awakening.