We trust you had a wonderful beginning to the Jubilee Year. As we begin the new semester, we continue to ponder on the meaning and consequences of being born from the heart of the Church. In the last newsletter, we reflected on our work of education as a service of love, attuned to the deepest human aspirations and leavened by the hopeful insight that God calls each of us to engage the world in our own meaningful way. Today, I would like to invite you to reflect on the university as a community of scholars, students and staff, all of whom devote our energies to research, teach, and serve present and future generations. In doing so, we lead by serving - a Christian understanding of leadership, and we live out a concrete manifestation of spiritual mercy, a work of love which the Church’s mission offers to humanity. Our online global campus provides a setting where people from the four corners of the globe can have access to and experience this service wherever they are.
As part of the Church and a Christian community of faculty, students, and staff, first and foremost we strive, despite our human frailties, to be a place to encounter Christ. This relationship elicits a desire for God and a desire to grow in the knowledge and understanding of Him and his teaching. In this way, as Pope Benedict XVI reminds us, “those who meet Christ are drawn by the very power of the Gospel to a new life characterized by all that is beautiful, good, and true; a life of Christian witness nurtured and strengthened within the community of our Lord’s disciples, the Church.” In a world, which so often lacks hope, we proclaim with confidence the hope which does not disappoint (cf. Rom 5:5). This combination of personal encounter, knowledge, and Christian witness, is integral to the service the university provides to humanity. It influences all aspects of university life and leads us to discover God as a Father who invites each of His children to respond in a free and responsible way. Our university community offers every generation the opportunity to discover the ultimate truth about his or her own life, to lift each other by example and loving service, and to shape the future through their work and contribution to science in expanding areas of knowledge.
One of these areas is emerging technologies. We want to influence positively the applications of these technologies through our new Master of Science in Prudential Design of AI and other Emerging Technologies, which we will offer this coming Fall. we will seek to show how these technologies can be advanced in humane and faithtful ways. Of course, such an approach requires dedication and perseverance. Yet, as Benedict XVI reminds us “It is not easy to make something beautiful and great of a university community’s life. It is demanding, though with Christ, everything is possible!” (Address January 21, 2008) The living faith of the university community is an especially powerful instrument of hope. We receive and transmit the riches of our Catholic traditon of faith and reason to sanctify the temporal order now and in the future. Thanks to this faithful mission of ours, Catholic International’s community continues to play the unique and indispensable role it does in Catholic Higher Education worldwide.
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