Mass of the Holy Spirit

Oct. 3, 2025

Why do we begin each school year at Seattle University with a Mass of the Holy Spirit? I’d like to suggest a couple of different answers, which are not mutually exclusive.

The first, and perhaps the least interesting, is that Jesuit universities have been starting the school year with a Mass of the Holy Spirit for nearly 500 years.  St. Ignatius and the first Jesuits celebrated a Mass of the Holy Spirit at their first school in Messina, Sicily in 1548.  And we have been following their example ever since.

For Catholics, the fact that we have done something for 500 years is a pretty good reason to keep doing it. 

Tradition!

But this simple answer still leaves many questions.

Why a Mass of the Holy Spirit? Why not a Mass in honor of Mary or of St. Ignatius? 

Why not a Mass in honor of St. Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of Philosophers?  Or of St. Thomas Aquinas? 

This leads to a second answer: There is a very close connection between the Holy Spirit and the work of a Jesuit university.

In the Thirteenth Century, Thomas Aquinas identified seven “gifts of the Holy Spirit,” which he culled from his readings of scripture and the Christian tradition.  They are: 

• Wisdom
• Understanding
• Prudence
• Fortitude
• Knowledge
• Piety
• And fear of God.

Wisdom, understanding, knowledge, prudence — these are key traits that Seattle University seeks to instill in our students.  These are also virtues we hope our faculty and staff will bring to their work. These are gifts that every one of us can embrace, regardless of our religious beliefs.

Wisdom holds a particularly important place for a university — especially a Jesuit university.

The leader of the Jesuits around the world — Fr. General Arturo Sosa — has repeatedly identified the goal of Jesuit education as instilling in our students a “wisdom that comes from discernment.”

As he noted this past summer at a global gathering of Jesuit universities in Bogota, Colombia, many features of the world around us reaffirm the importance of this Jesuit commitment to wisdom.

The Father General specifically pointed to increasing political polarization as something that has impoverished our discourse and dulled what he called our “political sense.”

In our polarized society, it has become much more difficult to listen and learn from those who think differently from us. 

When we perceive our political opponents as existential threats, we are tempted to treat political disagreement as an all-or-nothing team sport. 

The result is a reactive, unthinking resistance to those we perceive as political “others.” 

If “they” are for it, then I must be against it. 

Engaging in this kind of knee-jerk opposition to our political adversaries is the opposite of wisdom. 

It hands our agency and our rationality over to others. 

It is like giving our political adversaries a remote control over our minds.

The Jesuit tradition calls us to “sharpen our political sense” by committing ourselves to a culture of affirmative encounter and “dialogue,” even with those with whom we disagree.

Universities are ideal places for this kind of encounter and dialogue.

In his remarks to university leaders from around the world this past summer, Fr. General Sosa called dialogue “the characteristic method” of the Jesuit university.  And dialogue, he said, “[pre]supposes the creation and maintenance of plural spaces.”

Maintaining plural spaces that promote dialogue requires us to create an inclusive campus community that welcomes people of all identities but also a wide range of viewpoints. 

It requires us to cultivate the gifts of wisdom and understanding. 

It requires the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

A second phenomenon that requires us to cultivate the gifts of wisdom and understanding is the rapid technological change swirling all around us, and especially the recent rise of generative AI.

Current versions of AI identify statistical regularities drawn from massive datasets – datasets that constitute almost the entire written and visual product of humankind.

Analyzing this compendium of human knowledge and creativity, large language models, such as ChatGPT, operate by – in essence – predicting which words are most likely to follow other words.

The result is a genuinely impressive technology that can generate sophisticated, even human-seeming compositions – in response to natural language prompts.

And yet, we know from the way large language models work that they are lacking in actual understanding and wisdom. 

Some critics have characterized large language models as glorified “auto-completes” or – in Emily Bender’s memorable phrase – as “stochastic parrots.”

In contrast, the proponents of AI have made very enthusiastic claims about its capabilities.

Many AI proponents have predicted that – by increasing the scale of the databases used to train large-language models – often at tremendous costs to the environment – we will soon achieve general artificial intelligence, or even a so-called super-intelligence, with possible consequences for humanity ranging from the utopian to the apocalyptic.

I am hardly the one to adjudicate this question, since I thought no one would ever want to buy books on the Internet.

But it almost doesn’t matter who is right about AI.

If the claims of AI supporters are NOT true, we may be pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into a technological strategy doomed to generate diminishing returns. 

And if their claims ARE true, we may be rushing headlong to create an unpredictable and powerful technology that none of us seem prepared to control.

Either way, the Jesuit tradition calls on us to take a deep breath, step back, and discern with – again – wisdom and understanding.

On the one hand, the Jesuit tradition seems to counsel us to do our best to carefully assess the features of AI that may prove useful and beneficial. 

On the other hand, the incentives of those investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI technology with the hope of reaping immense profit make them unreliable guides in our efforts to develop that understanding. 

For a Jesuit university, our mission is clear — to deploy the tools of our 500-year old pedagogical and spiritual tradition to discern the possibilities of AI; to understand the technology and its impacts on our society and our planet; and on our students’ educational experience.  

We are hard at work on that front, in an effort led by our Provost Shane Martin and our Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, Chris Van Liew.

In all of these efforts, our mission is to ensure, in Fr. General Sosa’s words, that “AI serves humanity and does not become a tool of dehumanization.”

To succeed, we will need the virtues of wisdom and understanding, which is another way of saying that we will need the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

So I thank you for joining us today for this five-century old ritual — this Mass of the Holy Spirit.

I wish each of you — students, faculty, staff and administration — the gifts of the Spirit in all your endeavors in the year ahead.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful
and kindle in them the fire of your love.

Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created,
and you shall renew the face of the earth.