Holy Family University Celebrates the Class of 2026
Holy Family University awarded undergraduate and graduate degrees to 870 students at its 69th commencement, held Saturday, May 16, at the University’s Newtown East campus.
The Class of 2026 includes 24 associate’s degree recipients, 585 bachelor’s degree recipients, 234 master’s degree recipients, 1 post-master’s certificate recipient, and 27 doctoral degree recipients across the University’s four schools: Arts & Sciences, Business & Technology, Education, and Nursing & Health Sciences.
Holy Family University president Anne Prisco, Ph.D., charged these new graduates with continuing to live the University’s mission teneor votis. “’I am bound by my responsibilities.’ It is a beautiful and humbling phrase. Responsibility not just to ourselves, but to one another. To lift others as we rise. To seek justice, serve with compassion, and lead with integrity,” she said.
“We are now alumni and representatives of Holy Family,” valedictorian Skyler Searfoss ’26 told the Class of 2026. “It’s our turn to show the world what this place stands for. Dream big but never forget the values that got you this far.”
The University also awarded honorary Doctors of Humane Letters to Sister Ilia Delio, OSF, Ph.D., a Franciscan Sister of Washington, D.C. and a professor of theology at Villanova University, and The Rev. Dr. Lorina Marshall-Blake, MGA, FAAN, immediate past president of the Independence Blue Cross Foundation and vice president of Community Affairs for Independence Blue Cross. The honorary degree recipients offered the Class of 2026 words of inspiration as they imagined their future and the future of their communities.
“The work of serving, of serving others is never finished,” Marshall-Blake told the graduate degree recipients. “I believe that the most meaningful version of service is not giving from a place of abundance, but from a place of memory. Remembering where you came from. Remembering who helped you. And making sure what was given to you has been passed on. For me, service has always meant meeting people where they are and walking alongside them toward something better. It means building together.”
Speaking to the undergraduate degree recipients, Sister Delio reminded the graduates, “Each person here has gifts—unique gifts, personal gifts—that only you can contribute to the world. Live from those gifts. Live from who you are and we will help build up this world and contribute to the life of God.”