Dear Friends:
As part of our observance of National Hispanic Heritage Month, we were honored to welcome Roberto Goizueta '76 who spoke after a Sunday evening dinner. Roberto is Professor Emeritus of Catholic Theology at Boston College. He is the former president of both the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States. He currently serves on the STM Board of Trustees. I share an excerpt from his excellent lecture:
“...the fact of the matter is that to be a human being, to be alive, is to exist in a situation of inherent insecurity, vulnerability and uncertainty. Regardless of how much money we have, where we go to college (even Yale), how prestigious our job is, how many guns we have, or how high the walls are around us, we do not know—and cannot know for sure—what tomorrow holds. Our lives and futures are always beyond our complete control, but we try to avoid this painful, inescapable reality at all costs, and one way we do this is by avoiding those people in our communities who themselves live in situations of vulnerability and insecurity.
We feel threatened by them, because they remind us of what we would rather forget: namely that ultimately, we are all in the same boat. None of us is in complete control. None of us knows for sure what the future holds... The powerless, vulnerable persons in our midst force us to be honest about that reality. We thus erect all sorts of walls and barriers, both visible and invisible, to shield us from the most vulnerable people of our societies—the poor, the sick, the elderly, the homeless, the stranger, the prisoner, the undocumented, the unborn. We avoid the poor not because we are afraid of them, but because we are afraid of ourselves. We are afraid that we may not be as invulnerable and invincible as we think we are, so we put the poor out of sight, on the other side of the tracks or on the other side of the border, where we will never have to come across them. We put them anywhere but in our supposedly secure, peaceful neighborhoods. At its very core, however, the Christian story represents a fundamental rejection of this dynamic of fear, exclusion and violence.”
In addition to the intellectual development of our students, we are seriously committed to an emphasis on service as an integral part of a young Catholic’s formative experience at Yale. I hope that in reading this issue of our magazine, especially our featured article on our Summer Ambassador program, you will see some of the examples of what we offer in this area.
Thank you for your generosity which makes these initiatives and so many other opportunities available to our students. I am personally grateful to you.
Fr. Robert Beloin
Chaplain
