Scott Moringiello '97
Lexington, KY

“If you want to know God, give alms. Such was the advice the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to a friend. When I first heard Hopkins’s words, I’ll admit that I thought he was offering a koan, not a piece of practical wisdom. Needless to say, this wasn’t the first or last time it took a while for me to figure out a Jesuit was on to something.

The First Letter of John makes a startling claim. It says that God is love. The word for love here is agape, and it is relatively unknown before the writings that became the New Testament. The God that Christians worship is, on this account, the love that sacrifices and asks for nothing in return. It’s that in which we live and move and have our being. It’s the reason that there is something rather than nothing. Agape became incarnate as a Jewish man of the first century of the common era, who dared to call that love Father, who washed his followers’ feet, and who loved them to the end.

Agape in Greek became caritas in Latin. And caritas made its way into English as “charity.” That word, though, doesn’t pack much punch. Sure, we all want to be charitable, but we see charity (or at least I do) as something extra, something nice, something that helps our tax returns.

In one way, of course, our support of the Regis annual fund is charitable. I used to think that my donation to Regis was my way of giving back to the school. But I’ve come to realize that formulation falls short. First of all, it suggests an exchange: Regis gave me something, and now it’s my turn to give something back. In order to give back, though, you need to take a full account of what you’ve been given. How could I possibly do that? How can I give back to the place that gave me myself?

So “charity” doesn’t quite work, but reminding myself about caritas and agape does get closer to the mark. The love John talks about changed Ignatius of Loyola’s life. It has motivated the Society of Jesus ever since. It inspired Mrs Grant and her family. It helped our devoted teachers and family members put up with us, a group of precocious teenage boys. And, although I’m sure we didn’t know it at the time, this love slowly bound us together and formed us into men for others.

I’m an academic. I still puzzle over the questions that I first encountered at Regis, and if I’m one-tenth of the teacher that Fr Bender or Mr Connelly or Dr Mac or Mr DiMichele or Fr Judge was, then I can rest easy. Thanks to Regis, I went to a college where I met my wife. Thanks to Regis I met my best friends. On 84th Street, I learned the ablative and genitive absolute, the Krebs cycle, the quadratic equation, the Habsburg and Roosevelt dynasties, and the documentary hypothesis. And within five minutes of meeting me, I’ll tell you all of that. But the most important lesson I learned was that to love, to become a man for others, was to give all you have and not count the costs. My alms to Regis are, I hope, a small participation in the love that has formed me."