 Good afternoon. To the IU community that's here with us this afternoon, a very, very warm welcome. It's so nice to see you all back on campus. I really miss seeing you. We are live streaming the Mass this afternoon, so I would also like to welcome those of you who are joining us virtually. It really is an honor, a true honor to have with us this afternoon Archbishop Perez who will celebrate our Mass. Also with us today on our alumni hall altar will be Monsignor John Savinsky who accompanies the Archbishop. And we were supposed to have Father Kyle Adamsick with us this afternoon. However, something came up for him and he will not be able to join us. We're sorry he couldn't. Father Kyle is an alum and he's also a current student in our graduate studies program. We will miss him. Today we celebrate the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas was a priest, theologian and philosopher who wrote extensively on unity, harmony, faith and reason. He is the patron ironically of Catholic higher education. In the Gospel today, we are reminded that we must let our light shine in the world. We're reminded that Immaculata may always be your light and the light for others. Please stand and join in singing Holy Wisdom, Lamp of Learning. Good afternoon. Oh, you could do better than that. Good afternoon. It's great to be here at Immaculata to celebrate the recourse with you and for you. So I offer this Mass for each of you, for the sisters and for your faculty and for your parents, your families, especially for the prayers that each one of us carry deep in our hearts today. And I also invite those who join us virtually to close our eyes along with us to bring to our hearts and minds the intention that we want to pray for at this Mass. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, peace be with you as we come together to celebrate the Father's love. Let us call to mine our sin and our weakness and ask the Lord for pardon and strength. You were sent to heal the contrite of heart, Lord have mercy. You came to call sinners, Christ have mercy. You are seated at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us, Lord have mercy. May Almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins and bring us to everlasting life. Let us pray. O God who made St. Thomas Aquinas outstanding in his zeal for holiness and his study of sacred doctrine, grant us we pray that we may understand what he taught and imitate what he accomplished. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. A reading from the Book of Wisdom. I prayed and prudence was given to me. I pleaded and the spirit of wisdom came to me. I preferred her to the scepter and throne and deemed riches nothing in comparison with her. Nor did I liken any priceless gem to her because all gold and view of her is a little sand and before her silver is accounted to mire. Beyond health and comeliness I loved her and chose to have her rather than light because the splendor of her never yields to sleep. Now God grant I speak suitably and value these endowments at their worth for he is the guide of wisdom and the director of the wise for both we and our words are in his hand as well as all prudence and knowledge of crafts. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples. Do not be called rabbi. You have but one teacher and you are all brothers and sisters. Call no one on earth your father. You have but one father in heaven. Do not be called master. You have one master, the Christ. The greatest among you must be your servant. Whoever exalts themselves will be humbled. But whoever humbles themselves will be exalted. The Gospel of the Lord. Thank you so much for your invitation to visit Immaculata. Not my first time that I'm here. I have to be careful my senior Savinsky said do not fall into the orchestra pit. I'm a little paranoid now. But it's wonderful to be back to Immaculata and visit you and get a wonderful tour with passionate, exciting students that spend most of the morning with me today. Let's give a wave to those who are joining us in virtually. Where are they? Say hello. So today you celebrate in a sense a patron, right? St. Thomas Aquinas, patron of higher education. St. Thomas Aquinas is known for a lot of things. But the thing that made him most famous was that he was the greatest theologian, you know, the 20th century. Up to the 20th century. This guy gave us the summa, gave us all sorts of theological words and thoughts and concepts. And at the end what was it that Thomas was looking for? He was looking for the same thing you came to look for here. And those of you that have come back or those that teach, you're all about the same thing too. To proclaim what other people came here to look for. And that is the truth. Truth. So when I went to school and you went to school and we went to our very first arithmetic class, they wanted to share with us a truth, right? That one in one equals two. That doesn't equals four, it doesn't equals three, it equals two. There's a truth to that, right? And by and large when all of our education is about that, is about searching for that which is true. And then you're tested. So you're given a question and you better get the true answer, right? Because if you don't get the true answer, you're going to get a true grade, right? And you have to study for that. You have to embrace that. When I was in college, I had, I think it was a physics, no it wasn't, was it physics? It was some crazy course like physics or statistics or calculus, you know. You take these things, I was a clinical psych major. So why in God's name do I have to take physics, right? And so I had a physics midterm. And I think I got a little distracted the week before. And so the morning of driving, I was a commuter driving to school. I quickly realized that I really hadn't embraced the truth of that physics exam, right? And so I resorted to prayer. I thought prayer's going to do it, right? So I remember taking out my beads and praying the whole rosary half hour, right? Enough for a rosary and a little time left over, right? And then I said these incredible prayers to God. I was impressed with these prayers. And I talked to the Lord and told him about, you know, I'm not fooled. The only person who has total truth and knowledge is you. And so I connect with you the source of all knowledge and truth and ask you to infuse my mind of these physics theories or whatever it was. And I was impressed. I remember saying that was a really good prayer, right? I took the test and I failed, right? Because there was another truth that is good to pray if you have an exam. But you might want to follow it up with some study, right? And not be out partying, right? Truth. Ultimately that's why students come here. That's why you teach. That's why the sisters established this school of higher learning, right? To share, to impart truth. In whatever discipline it was. So anytime you walk into a classroom and the professor stands in front of that classroom, they want to share the truth of their discipline, the truth of their academic area. And if they don't, if they don't get their facts right, they immediately get... They don't know what they're talking about. They don't know what they're talking about. Because you come here ultimately in a quest for truth. Now I don't know if that's why you decided to come. That's why you filled out the application. I taught at LaSalle University actually for about ten years. And I used to do, every semester I would do a little exercise with my students and I would ask them, why are you even here? Why did you come here? And I would ask them to think about it. And at the end, for the ten years that I was there, it all came down to basically three things. And it wasn't really the truth either. The search for the truth. They wanted a good education so they could get a good job so they could live a good life. Those were the three things fundamental, right? A good education, good preparation to get a good job so they could then live a good life, whichever way they defined that to be. But at the end, what was presented to them was the truths. And whatever Thomas Aquinas studied day in and day out, he studied a lot, spoke several languages. They say he could do three or four projects at the same time in different languages. He was a, what do they call that today when you could do three or, multi-tasker. He was the ultimate multi-tasker. But at the end of the day, he discovered the greatest truth of them all. Because he knew that after he wrote the summa and after he did everything he did and we all studied his books and his scholastic theology and all that stuff, at the end of the day, when the time of his passage from this life to the next would come, he also knew that all of that really didn't matter. What mattered at the end was his embrace of the ultimate truth. And the ultimate truth, he came to understand and then proclaim too, that the ultimate truth is revealed through God, through Christ. And so this particular institution of higher learning has as a center of its capitalism the presentation of the ultimate truth in capital letters, which is Christ himself. How blessed you are, right? How blessed you are to be here. And I hope that whether you're a faculty or student or staff to be part of this community filled with such great students, with passionate students, that you thank God. You know, if there's something that COVID has taught us is to appreciate what we have. Because for a moment and now for almost a year, some of it has been taken away, right? We can't even go to the movies, right? I think at least I don't think we can yet, I don't know. But something as simple as I used to love going to King of Prussia and going to the movie theater there after hitting Shake Shack. And now like for a while there, you couldn't hit Shake Shack, let alone go to a movie. Life as we understood it was kind of changed. Those of you who are grandparents couldn't even visit your grandchildren. Life changed. And so I would hope that as you come here to pursue, yes, a good job, a good education, so you get a good job and live a good life, whichever way you understand that to be, that you know that at the end what is given to you as a gift is truth. The truth of Christ. And then all these little truths that you're learning in your classes. We're actually little truths because none of those truths actually at the end of the day will take you from this life to another. It won't, right? Thank God because if it was about physics, I'm in trouble. I'm in trouble. So thank the Lord for the great gift that you have here at Immaculata for the gift of your faculty and people who support the mission of the school for the sisters who founded them. You know, you're blessed to still have them around. You know, I've been to Catholic colleges around the country that were founded by orders, but there's no one there left. What they have is the spirit of their charism, right? But they don't have a max sitting there. You still do. You have around 600 of them. You're blessed. Be blessed. Be grateful for all these blessings that you have as you pursue the truth in the same way that Thomas Aquinas did. You know where he went to discover most of his truth, though? Actually, it wasn't in a book. It actually wasn't in a book. It was in prayer. It was before the blessed sacrament. That's where he went to discover the ultimate truth because he understood what the bearer of that truth said. From the Gospel of John, there's all these I statements, right? They call them the I statements. And one of them Jesus speaks about without any apology. He says, I am the truth. I am the way. I am the life. Thomas Aquinas discovered that. And we pray that we, totally, ultimately, discovered as well. God bless you. On this feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, we are reminded of the privilege of receiving an education. Give us grace to remember always that we must give back to those around us. Mindful that we do each day at Immaculata affects the future of humanity. We present our petitions. Our response is Lord, hear our prayer. For Pope Francis, bishops, and all holy men and women, that they may be faithful to their call to holiness, we pray. Lord, hear our prayer. For leaders of all nations that they make decisions based on justice for all people, we pray. Lord, hear our prayer. For our nation's leaders, that bringing about healing and unity be a priority, we pray. Lord, hear our prayer. For all who suffer physical, mental, or emotional pain, and for all who suffer from any type of social injustice, we pray. Lord, hear our prayer. For all members of the Immaculata community, that each of us may be faithful to our core values of faith, community, knowledge, virtue, and service, we pray. Lord, hear our prayer. For all who have suffered from COVID-19 and all those who died, we pray. Lord, hear our prayer. And we lift up to our loving God the intention, prayer, the need for which we pray at this mass. We pray to the Lord. Lord, hear our prayer. Oh, God, we thank you for your ever-faithful love and ask you to be with us each moment of our lives. Bless all who we meet this day. We ask this in the name of your Son, Jesus. Amen. Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you. Fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life. Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the wine we offer you. Fruit of the vine and work of human hands, it will become our spiritual drink. Pray, my sisters and brothers, that this my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the Almighty Father. May the sacrifice which we gladly present on the feast day of blessed Thomas Aquinas be pleasing to you, oh God, for taught by him we too give ourselves entirely to you in praise through Christ our Lord. The Lord be with you. Lift up your hearts. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation always and everywhere to give you thanks. Lord, Holy Father, Almighty and Eternal God through Christ our Lord. For as on the festival of St. Thomas, you bid your church rejoice. So to you strengthen her by the example of his holy life, teach her by his words of preaching and keep her safe in answer to his prayers. And so with the company of angels and saints we sing the hymn of your praise as without end we acclaim. Indeed holy, oh Lord, the fount of all holiness, make holy therefore these gifts we pray by sending down your spirit upon them like the dewfall so that they may become for us the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. At the time he was betrayed and entered willingly into his passion, he took bread and giving thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples saying, take this all of you and eat of it, for this is my body which will be given up for you. In a similar way when supper was ended he took the chalice and once more giving thanks he gave it to his disciples saying, take this all of you and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Remember this in memory of me, the mystery of faith. Therefore as we celebrate the memorial of his death and resurrection, we offer you Lord the bread of life and the chalice of salvation, giving thanks that you have held us worthy to be in your presence and minister to you. Humbly we pray that partaking of the body and blood of Christ we may be gathered into one by the Holy Spirit. Remember Lord your church spread throughout the world and bring her to the fullness of charity together with Francis our Pope and Nelson our local bishop with bishops and religious and laity and clergy everywhere. Remember also our sisters and brothers who have fallen asleep in the hope of the resurrection and all who have died in your mercy. Welcome them into the light of your face. Have mercy on us all we pray that with the blessed Virgin Mary, mother of God, with Joseph our spouse, with the blessed apostles, with St. Thomas Aquinas and with all the saints who have pleased you throughout the ages, we may be married to be co-heirs to eternal life and may praise and glorify you for your son Jesus Christ. Through him and with him and in him oh God Almighty Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit all glory and honor is yours forever and ever. At the Savior's command and formed by divine teaching we dare to say our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Deliver us Lord we pray from every evil graciously grant peace in our days that by the help of your mercy we may be always free from sin from all distress as we await the blessed hope in the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ. Lord Jesus Christ who said to your apostles peace I leave you my peace I give you look not on our sins but on the faith of your church and graciously grant her peace and unity in accordance with your will who live and reign forever and ever. The peace of the Lord be with you always. Behold the Lamb of God behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb. Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof but only say the word and my soul shall be healed. Refresh by heavenly food we humbly implore you O Lord that attentive to the teaching of blessed Thomas Aquinas we may abide at all times in thanksgiving for the gifts we have received through Christ our Lord. Please be seated. Good afternoon. We're about to give the Saint Catherine Medal and that's usually awarded at the beginning of the academic year at the mass of the Holy Spirit. This year we were not able to gather the community so we decided to wait until Archbishop Perez could be here. So this student has waited a long time to receive this award. In 1926 Charter members of Kappa Gamma Pi selected Saint Catherine of Alexander to be the patron saint of their organization. This fourth century Egyptian saint possessed great faith, intellect and integrity qualities to which the members of the society aspire. Immaculata University members of Kappa Gamma Pi carry on this proud tradition as they distinguish themselves by their scholarship and leadership in extracurricular activities both on campus or volunteer off-campus projects. Each spring faculty members review the list of Kappa Gamma Pi members and choose one student to receive the Saint Catherine Medal. The highest honor bestowed on a student in the College of Undergraduate Studies at Immaculata University. I would now like to introduce Dr. Sandra Nolan to present this year's awardee. I probably don't need this but... The Saint Catherine of Alexandria Medal was awarded to an individual who exemplifies wisdom, fortitude and Christian service. And no one represents these characteristics more than Ms. Lynn Krieger. Lynn, I invite you to come to the stage with me here. I have known Lynn for almost three years as she has progressed through the nursing program as an honor student with a minor in music. Nursing is a tough major and not an easy accomplishment let alone as an honor student with a minor. Not only is Lynn an outstanding student dedicated to learning but she is also the president of the Crown of Creation, a Christian women's group that focus is on building community, support for each other and developing a global understanding of women in the world. She is an ambassador for Catholic Relief Services promoting Christian values in social justice and awareness. She plays her viola for the Immaculata Symphony and serves as a representative on the Symphony Board. She tutors fellow nursing students, assists the admissions departments in welcoming potential students and provides tours of the campus and orientation assistants. Oh, and she's also treasurer of the Student Nurses Association. Not that this is not enough but she also works as a nurse extern in a community hospital and already has a position as a graduate nurse on an oncology unit upon her graduation in May. Lynn is determined, kind, compassionate and empathetic, humble, spiritual, and willing to always help others. She is reserved in nature but a very strong leader, wise beyond her years and the best example of spiritual conviction in practice that I have ever seen in teaching. Wisdom, fortitude, and Christian service, I can think of no other or no better recipient an example of these virtues than Ms. Lynn Krieger. Congratulations, Lynn. Your patients will be very reassured to know that you're an honor student. In many ways, from what I hear, the description that they make of you, you exemplify that gospel service to give of yourself and give as a gift ultimately what you yourself have received as a gift. Thank you so much and congratulations. Dr. Latiri, thank you so much for your invitation to come here and she comes from my home state, original home state. I have like three of them. I'm like a bag of wine. So it was Florida then, it was Jersey and I spent two thirds of the last, two thirds of my life here in the Philadelphia area except for the eight, I call it my eight years of exile. So I was like sent out and then sent back to the Promised Land. So I'm very happy. So resident, this is the Promised Land. I hate to tell you. Try to find a cheese steak and Trenton. The Lord be with you. And may Almighty God bless you, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Go in peace. As Father Bill gave in his instructions prior to Mass, the Archbishop has graciously agreed to meet and greet, participate in receiving line for the community. First off, we're going to have the administration, the sisters of Mack Heart and Mary. They will exit out. Once they're done, we would ask everyone in these socially distant times the markings are on the floor to go out with that.