2025 Commencement Speaker, Dr. Arthur Brooks

0:06We are honored today to award Arthur Brooks this honoris causa degree and to invite him to say a few words as our main speaker today. Thank you, father John. Thank you. Thank you so much, president, father Sikorsky, bishop Burbich, bishop Laverde, faculty, staff, trustees, families, and especially graduates. I'm so grateful to you for inviting me here today to speak to you and and and to receive this honorary degree. This is something I've been looking forward to because this is a special community. Congratulations on your achievement, of course, but even more on the work that you're about to do, that beautiful homily by Bishop Berbich talking about the opportunity to lift up other people in need, the the privilege of being able to do so with the expertise that you've gained.

0:59It's now needed more than at any other time, in my lifetime at least. I don't have to tell you about the, you know, grim statistics about mental health in America or the world. A lot of people are in pain. And that's what you will be seeking to address with your first class training at DMU. But you're also equipped with more than just competence and psychological science, also with the cross and gospel of Jesus Christ. Of course, you know this. But here's my question, really my challenge for the graduates today, but really for all of us. How do you see yourselves not just as Catholic professionals helping Catholic people, but rather using your expertise, how can you be missionaries in a secular society?

1:48How can you use what you're excellent at and what the world admires you for and the skills that you've gained to lift people up and take them to heaven? How does that work? Well, the truth of the matter is that you're some of the best people to do exactly that. Why? The con con celebrants of the mass, they're our, as Catholics, they're our uniformed military. We're the spies. We're the secret agents. We can do a lot because nobody's paying attention when we're talking about the faith and lifting them up. So what I wanna do in just ten or twelve minutes, because they didn't give me an hour, you're we'll all be pleased to know. How do I do it and how can you do it? See, my job, I'm a behavioral scientist as well.

2:38I'm not a clinician. I'm a researcher. My PhD is in in in research and behavioral science. But I teach the science of happiness at Harvard University. I teach large classes of students at the Harvard Business School. My job is not overt proselytization. If it were, I would be in the unemployment line in approximately twenty minutes. But it's still missionary work. Over the years, I've done missionary work in my ordinary secular work as a scientist by employing three principles that I'm gonna offer you today. To start your journey as a missionary, here's three ideas. Number one. This one sounds easy. It's not. Be public about your Catholic faith. You know, it's easy to be private Catholics. We're all with our community here, with our pals, people who understand us.

3:34But out in the world, when we're not hanging out together, it's too easy to keep it private. Isn't it? A lot of academics do this, by the way. A lot of my fellow professors around the country. I do about a 100 lectures outside of Harvard a year. A lot of them at universities. And mostly secular institutions and other professors come to me and they say, I'm Catholic too. As if it were some sort of big secret. That's not the right way to do it. Now, there's a reason sometimes that being a Catholic, that having an unusual view in a secular world, especially when you're in the world of science, Sometimes it's hard to do that. The reason is not because we face discrimination. That's just not right.

4:16Thank God we live in America where we are not discriminated against in any material or or serious way for our views, for our beliefs. The problem is us. You know this because you've studied this. The rest of us don't always remember. Our brains are designed to make us resist standing out against a prevailing view. The ancient console of tissue inside our brains that processes our emotions is called the limbic system. It's between two and forty million years ago. And it has this little thing inside it. It's a technical thing. You don't have to remember this. There's no quiz later. It's called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and it has one job to make you not want to be rejected socially.

5:02That was evolved so you will not get thrown out of your tribe. Why? Because two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, you'd walk the frozen tundra and die alone. Well, not today, friends. But we still have the same brain. And so when the when the world is going this way, we wanna go this way too. And sometimes we're silent about zagging when the world is zigging. That's a big problem. We need to stand up to that. We need to use the the divine center of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, the executive center of our brain to make the decisions that we want given our beliefs, notwithstanding what we feel because of our evolutionary proclivities. We have a a divine nature. That's what it means to be a believing Christian.

5:52Use it. And the way to use it is by being public about our faith, notwithstanding our feelings. And getting used to it so that we're not afraid. And as excellent professionals that gain the admiration of others, that's the most important thing that we can do. And the result? Oh, it's funny. During the lectures that I do publicly, I get to meet a lot of different audiences. And not that long ago, I was in Georgia giving a talk to a group of surgeons. Those are tough people. Surgeons. Yeah. I mean, they're smarter than everybody, cooler than everybody, more sophisticated than everybody. And I was about to go up and give my speech about a neuroscience topic, typical to my research. But before I did, I crossed myself because I always do to offer up my words.

6:40For the holy souls in purgatory. All those surgeons in purgatory. And afterward, a surgeon comes up to me and he says, I thought he was gonna say, oh, I liked your speech. No. And he said, tears in his eyes. And he said, that was so meaningful to me. And I said, well, thank you. And what did I say? He said, that wasn't it. I said you crossed yourself before you gave your talk. I wanna do that. I was raised Catholic. I've been gone for a long time. I want that. I said, man, there's a church on every corner. It's like Starbucks. But it takes you to heaven. And who knows where he is at this point? Well, why was he evangelized in that moment? He was evangelized in that moment moment not because of anything I said, but because I was public about my faith.

7:33And we can all do that. That's number one. But but it takes a little bit of practice to be public. And that leads me to my point number two, which is making our faith not just public but natural and normal. You know, many people who are trying to make a point of being publicly Catholic, unfortunately, they make it a little bit awkward. It's a little bit in your face. It's a little bit weird because they try to inject it into every single conversation and it feels sort of forced. But but here's the funny thing about the naturalness of faith. Faith is literally the most natural thing in the world for Homo sapiens, for our species. Research shows that humans have a religious instinct. Many believe it is biological in nature.

8:22I happen to share that view based on the preponderance of evidence. There are literally no societies recorded in human history that are not religious. Not one. We are made to worship. That's the truth. You know what's unnatural? Secularism. That's unnatural. That's the most unnatural thing that people can turn to. And that's the reason, my friends, that people all over the world turn to non religious things to get their religion. Secularism has torqued us away from the natural to the unnatural because we have this instinct. Things like politics and social activism, they're characterized today by talk about good and evil and with esoteric language and with ritual. All we need on campus for their politics is to have incense, then we'll have it all.

9:15But fake religion doesn't get the job done, my friends. That's why politics and activism, when they become an identity, always, always, always lead to depression and anxiety, which you studied and we know. So so why does something unnatural like that feel or something natural, I should say, like religion. Why has it become unnatural? And the reason is because the world has pathologized the natural and normal and has normalized the pathological. That's the little trick of the dark one in our world today. We see this all around us. Your faith, oh, it's weird and funny, but shocking and immoral and bad things. No big deal. Right? Cruelty, greed, licentiousness, death. Normal. But going to mass at lunch on Wednesday?

10:03Really weird. So so what's the answer? The answer is to make it as the most natural thing in your life. Here's how I do it in my classes and in my talks. I have made a commitment that I will not neglect to say at least once in every public appearance that my Catholic faith is the most important thing in my life. And I just throw it out there. Oh, and by the way, when I'm talking about faith, I'm a Catholic. It happens to be the most important thing in my life. Normal. I quit a mass. I also breathe air and eat food and wear pants out in public. Although, you wouldn't really know if I'm not right now, would you? You know, it's so natural, as a matter of fact, that when people come up to me and say, oh, how brave that you're a public Catholic in a place like Harvard University down the world, as if I were, chief rabbi in Mecca or something.

11:02No. No. How could I live any other way? Make it natural. And last but not least, here's my last point. Make your faith magnetic because that turns out to be the master stroke. You're doing it in public. You're making it natural and you draw people to you because of your faith. We are, if you haven't noticed, in a pretty serious culture war in this country. If you haven't noticed it, congratulations. It means you don't watch TV at night or participate in social media, but it's pretty bad, worse than I've seen. Now, why do we participate in that as Catholics with the the bitterness, the contempt, the anger, the hatred across political lines, across ideological lines. And the reason is, once again, our brains make us do that.

11:51When we are threatened, there's a part of our brain called the amygdala that says fight or flight. When somebody disagrees with us ideologically, when somebody says a nasty thing about our Catholic faith, it lights up our amygdala like a Christmas tree. And it says, fight now. And how do we fight? We fight using the tools that people are using against us and then we're not behaving like Catholics. You know the best way to eviscerate your faith and make it repellent to the outside world? Act like they do. That's the best way to do it. So so so what do we do? What's the answer? People ask that all the time. And and here's the typical answer. Be civil. Be tolerant. That's garbage. If I told you that my wife Esther and I are civil to each other, you'd say, dude, you guys need therapy from a graduate of Divine Mercy University.

12:46If I told you that my employees tolerate me, you'd say I have a huge human resource problem on my hands. No. No. No. That's not the standard. You know what the standard is? Pardon a long time ago. You've heard that you should love your friends and hate your enemies. But today I give you a new teaching. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. My friends, that's the Catholic standard. That's the Christian life. That is the privilege that Bishop Berbich was talking about. You're out in a tough world lifting people up. A lot of those people are participating in behavior that does not become us as Catholic people. They disagree with you. They're doing the wrong thing. Love them. That's what we're learning to do as scientists, as Catholics no.

13:38As Catholic scientists. But I don't feel like it. I know. It doesn't matter because that's not what love is. Saint Thomas Aquinas said in December in the Summa Theologia, to love is to will the good of the other, not feel anything. You did not study people's feelings, only people's feelings. You studied how people can actually be notwithstanding their feelings. People don't have to be managed by their feelings. They can manage their feelings in the way to do so is to exercise their heavenly will. That's what Saint Thomas Aquinas was talking about. That's the lesson he was giving us for psychological science today. He was a very adroit behavioral scientist himself. Love your enemies by willing their good.

14:27Love everybody by willing their good. Catholic missionaries in ordinary life decide how to act despite their emotions. Return contempt and disagreement with love. And what you will do is make people ask how did she do that? How did he do that? And then they'll find that it's because of your Christian faith. And then that's what they will want, which is your gift to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ and get sold to heaven. That's all we want. Let me sum up. We are called in our ordinary lives to sanctify our work as missionaries. You don't have to leave your secular job or knock on doors. You don't have to be that kind of missionary. Look. There's here's words that nobody in human history has ever uttered.

15:19Good news. There's missionaries on the porch. No. Never. But but but you don't have to because you're sneak you're sneakier than that. Right? You're doing excellent work in helping people. That's your missionary work. And to do that, follow a formula to sanctify that secular work by making your faith public, by making it natural, by making it magnetic. Strive to follow that formula as you go forth from this great institution and you will begin the journey of love and excellence and truth, which will bring you and me and all of us greater happiness and greater hope and greater holiness. God bless you. Congratulations on this achievement. And let's all pray for the graduates for their important work.

16:07Thank you very much.