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Dear brother bishops, as disciples of the Savior who assumed our human nature in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, let allow the Holy Spirit to unite us that we may speak with one voice and one heart in proclaiming the Gospel of Life and in defending human life from the moment of conception until natural death, and at every stage in-between, to the glory of the God who made us and redeemed us.

As a teacher of the faith, Pope St. Leo was both clear and pastoral. He was not a speculative theologian but he knew how to draw from the sources to clarify the Church’s faith.

As your friends, we commit ourselves to pray for vocations to your community, that the good work which the Lord has begun in you may continue and be brought to fulfillment in the Kingdom where he lives and reigns, world without end. Amen.

Let us climb the sycamore, let us get Jesus’ attention, let’s invite him in. Then let us rejoice as salvation comes to our house! That is all we truly need!

Let us ask Mary, who carried the Word made flesh in her womb to open the Scriptures for us this morning, so that we may bask in the great events of our salvation, events that unfolded in the land made holy by the footsteps of the Redeemer.

You, our first responders – police officers, firefighters, public safety officials – and all the civic officials and administrators who support them – you strive each day to be ambassadors of justice here in the City of Baltimore and throughout the State of Maryland.

My warmest congratulations to those of you about to be instituted in this ministry as also to your wives and families who share with you this journey of formation, which, God willing, will lead to diaconal ordination in the not-too-distant future.

If all this seems to be unrealistic, unreachable, hovering at 30,000 feet, perhaps you and I have only to recall brother priests of Baltimore who have been “bright lights”, beacons of the Spirit, in our midst.

In an age of cultural and intellectual fragmentation, Loyola is poised to render still greater service, both to the Catholic intellectual tradition and to the wider culture, by helping us and our contemporaries to integrate faith and reason, and helping all of us to overcome dead-end, polarizing ideologies, of the right and of the left, ideologies that refuse to view reality through a broader lens, the lens of reason illumined by faith.