Knowles At Ave Maria University: ‘Your Job Is Not To Change The World’ But ‘Cooperate With God’s Grace’

Daily Wire host Michael Knowles encouraged college graduates at Ave Maria University on Saturday to “not try to change the world,” but rather understand and interpret it.

Knowles received an honorary doctorate degree from the university ahead of a roughly 15-minutes address to the graduating class of 2025. The Catholic Daily Wire host told graduates that instead of attempting to change the world, they should focus on God and understanding the spiritual meaning that is connected with physical realities.

“Our Lord does not give us signs and wonders merely for our amusement. He gives us signs and wonders to point us to our final end, which is Him,” Knowles said. “A Catholic cannot ignore signs and wonders. The Catholic vision is full of symbols. There is no neutrality. There is no emptiness. Everything means something. Nothing means nothing.”

“To modern people without faith, even the most spectacular miracle can be nothing more than a coincidence. To Catholics, there can never be any such thing as a mere coincidence, no matter how trivial the phenomenon, because we know that God governs all things and has ordered the entire cosmos according to His providence down to the most minute detail. So, you’d better pay attention,” he added.

In his speech, Knowles lauded the graduates for choosing a religious institution such as Ave Maria to receive a “proper university education.” A true education must include religious study as God is the “source and summit of all knowledge,” he said.

“Universities are so called because they purport to teach universal knowledge, but as Saint John Henry Newman observed, ‘A university that neglects the source and summit of all knowledge can make no such claim,’” said Knowles. “These universities-in-name-only insist that they ignore God in order to pay greater attention to other supposedly sturdier subjects: biology, literature, philosophy, and so on.”

“But having gone wrong on the ultimate subject of knowledge, these schools quickly go wrong on subordinate areas of knowledge, too. They banish nature from philosophy, the great books from literature, and chromosomes from biology,” he continued. “Error in principle causes endless problems in the particulars.”

Toward the end of his speech, Knowles directed the graduates to leave graduation and “to cooperate with God’s grace to do what He wants for you.”

“Your job is not to change the world, which you could not do even if you tried, but rather to cooperate with God’s grace to do what He wants for you,” Knowles said. “The purpose of education is to cultivate your intellect and discipline your wills such that there is no difference between what God wants for you and what you want for yourselves. This lifelong habit is true education and the condition it brings is true freedom.”

“You, Ave Maria graduates, I hope and trust have an education that will allow you to make sense of the world – even to love the world – not so much for what it offers as for what it represents, not for its ephemeral pleasures, but for its meaning,” said Knowles.