John Garvey (cousin of Commonweal's fine columnist of the same name and a sometime contributor to the magazine himself) was inaugurated today as President of the Catholic University of America.John, former dean of the Boston College Law School and a friend of many years, entitled his inaugural address, "Intellect and Virtue: the Idea of a Catholic University." Blessed John Henry Newman, as one would expect, figured prominently in the reflections.Here is one passage:

The Catholic University of America is a university a community of scholars united in a common effort to find goodness, truth, and beauty. It is a place where we learn things St. Monica could not teach her son. Holy as she was, she could not have written the Confessions or The City of God. Smart as he was, neither could Augustine have written them without the intellectual companionship he found first at Carthage and later among the Platonists in Milan. The intellectual life, like the acquisition of virtue, is a communal (not a solitary) undertaking. We learn from each other. The intellectual culture we create is the product of our collective effort. A Catholic intellectual culture will be something both distinctive and wonderful if we bring the right people into the conversation and if we work really hard at it.

The rest is here.