February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The President offered an encouraging and personal speech after receiving an Honorary Degree of Law from the university.
“But for the most finely drawn of lines, I might be sitting among today’s parents listening to a different President of Ireland,” President McAleese explained to the crowd.
The president’s cousin, Ann Dillon, was at the commencement to see her own daughter, Caitlyn Dillon, receive an honors degree in business with the distinction of summa cum laude.
President McAleese was close to her cousin, Ann growing up in Belfast together.
“We started school together, sat in the same class, traveled there together hand in hand until the day she emigrated to Philadelphia at the age of nine.”
“I still remember the sudden emotional amputation that was the loss of a best friend and then the start of years of to-ing and fro-ing between Belfast and Philadelphia as the lived lives of families in those two cities wove their tapestry of mutual interest and care even across thousands of miles. Every coat I wore in my Belfast university days was one of her cast-offs.”
Still, President McAleese was not all sentiment. She took a direct stab at a group critical of Villanova University?s decision to award her the honorary degree.
In her opening remarks, the President quoted Cardinal John Henry Mary Newman and urged the graduates to “feel in me an inexpressive lightness and a sense of freedom’.”
Last week, a small, ultra-conservative group of American Catholics, known as the Cardinal Newman Society, chastised Villanova for giving President McAleese an honorary degree because they said she had been disrespectful of the Roman Catholic Church.
They cited her “strident calls” for women to become priests, and her defense of homosexual rights for their disdain.
The leader of the Cardinal Newman Society had promised to mobilize protesters for President McAleese’s appearance. According to university security services, there was one lone protester with a small sign at the commencement.
Similar promised protests by the Cardinal Newman Society at other university commencement exercises around the U.S. fizzled.