The following is an extract form the baccalaureate sermon given last weekend by Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan to the graduating students of Belmont Abbey College, Belmont, North Carolina.

The young Catholic today, breathing the ecumenical spirit passing part of his senior college year in the warm and holy liberty of the second Vatican Council, finds today’s challenge a rather startling combination of the old and new, the traditional and the progressive, the conservative and the liberal. Some of the old cliches no longer suffice: that Catholicism is best known as a strong bulwark against Communism that error has no rights, that prudence is the Catholic virtue, or even the greatest of virtues. Certainly, Catholicism and Communism are incompatible, certainly truth and error are in contradiction, certainly prudence is one of the virtues.

But we are entering an era of Catholic history where the old cliches must be reexamined. And the man who has pushed us into this era is the beloved pastor, the man who came from God whose name was John. In this homily we are not speaking of his magnificent treaties on justice or on peace, his devotion to Our Lady or St. Joseph, or his overwhelming desire that all might be one in the Church of Christ.

Because your college has an authentic intellectual tradition, rooted deeply in the long Benedictine affinity for the expansion of the mind, because this is the climax of your formal higher education, and because this nation and the world need the dedication of our best minds--this homily is on truth. This is why we beg God, just before the Gospel, to cleanse our hearts and lips-why we seek the Word in Whom life and light could be overcome by darkness. Truth is not a great rock, nor a fix star--life is not that simple. Truth is the real bond between Gods’ mind and things that exist; between these things and our minds, between what is in our mind and what is on our lips.

We reach truth by experience, by trial and error, by observation and experimentation, by the witness of true men, and the witness of Supreme Being revealing Himself to men. No one can be comfortable or complacent about holding the truth, but no man can afford to forsake its search, and no man dare hold it except in humble responsibility.

When Pope John opened the Second Vatican Council, he spoke of the permanence of divine truth. “it is necessary first of all that the Church should never depart form the sacred patrimony of truth received from the fathers.” It is not surprising that those who are young and restless hear these words with dismay. The prodigal son walked out of it is Father’s home; so did young Augustine, so today do college men who ask petulantly like Pilate, “What is truth?” and turn aside with their diploma, not waiting for an answer. It is the impatience of the immature spirit, the rejection of tradition as a living source.

Yet in the sciences we are still standing on the shoulder of Mendel, Darwin and Pasteur. History has its faults and literature its moods, but they bear witness to the painful, evolving civilization that we have reached. A Catholic priest has recently satirized the notion that “we are a perpetually innocent people,’ walking up to every problem and crisis as “if we were the first men who ever walked the earth’. A Catholic layman has called this “the tendency in American life for every new generation to play Robinson Crusoe.’ If this is foolishness in human knowledge, it is utter tragedy in our effort to learn about god. The deposit of faith comes from Christ, guaranteed by His promise to the Church that the Holy Spirit would bring to her mind all that he had taught.

YET IN the same paragraph in which Pope John spoke of not departing from the patrimony of truth, he used the word “new” three times. (The Church) “must ever look to the present to the new conditions and new forms of life introduced into the modern world which have opened up a new avenues to the Catholic apostolate.” This is the Christian dynamism that produced a St. Paul, a St. Benedicine, a St. Thomas Aquinas, a Frederick Ozanam, a John Henry Newman, and in our generation, a Pope John a growing vanguard of young Catholic thinkers, some priests, some sisters, some laymen. This is the possession of that abundant life mentioned in today’s mass, the evidence of the ferment that is inevitable when the deposit of faith is plunged into the whirlpool of world cares and concerns. Pope John used the world “new” many times when he spoke of the Council: “new energies from spiritual growth…a new order of human relations to which Divine Providence is leading us.

This is the paradox you graduates face, this is the reconciliation of the apparent contradiction that is your chief burden as Christian witnesses. It will be a lonely work because, unfortunately, docility is sometimes thought a more respectable virtue than curiosity, and conformity has almost replaced independence as the American hallmark.

To take one example of the new order,--religious liberty. Unaccountable many Catholic entered the pluralism of the present century unmindful of the dignity of the human conscience. Conformity was an easier approach. From Lactanitus to Pope Pius XII, there have never been lacking Christian teachers who recognized the rights of the non-Catholic conscience, but the textbooks did not always reflect this Christian tradition of liberty and the exigencies of a changing world. Too often our attitudes followed the textbooks.