Catholic Relief Services Speeches and Testimony

Ken Hackett's Cabrini College Commencement Address: Go With All Your Heart

May, 2009

President George, members of the Board of Trustees, distinguished faculty, supportive parents and friends, and members of the class of 2009.

I am honored to stand before you as you mark this most momentous day. I am in awe of this small college named after Mother Cabrini. I am impressed by the commitment, the energy, the ingenuity and the inspiration you have shown in the many things you've done to reach out to your community and to the world. Your commitment toward making our world a more just place is most impressive. In the course of my job as president of Catholic Relief Services, I visit a lot of college and university campuses. And I have to tell you, Cabrini is really something special. You should be congratulated and emulated. (I'm also very, very impressed by your lacrosse teams.)

I raise my voice with many others to congratulate all of you who are completing your journey at Cabrini today. Your achievements are many. And the challenges before you are great. I must say, you've picked a heck of a time to start looking for a job! We are all feeling the pain of this economic crisis. Your parents are undoubtedly feeling it. The college is feeling it. Nonprofit agencies like Catholic Relief Services are feeling it.

We have had to introduce a pay cut, discontinue certain investments and roll back certain programs. This has meant loss of job and people who have gone unserved. It's a tough environment out there. The world you face starting today is very different from that faced by graduating classes in recent history. You're going to need a firm sense of purpose, a lot of persistence and most important, a sense of humor.

As I tell my daughter who is graduating senior from a university in Maryland, you will succeed. Just be ready to adjust your success criteria! But I do not mean to be in any way flippant or insincere about you are facing.

But you have been well prepared by your years here at Cabrini. You have received valuable knowledge and have learned important skills. But above all, you have been grounded in some very important values, values that have been ingrained through a phrase that's very familiar to all of you: the "education of the heart."

So let's get practical. How will a philosophy like education of the heart help you land a job? Let me break it down.

First comes education. There may be some of you out there who are hoping that this phase of your life ends today. No more classes, no more exams, no more all-night cramming. And for many, that may be the case. Some of you—who haven't had enough—will go on to graduate school. But for many others, this may be the end….or at least the beginning of a long break…from formal education.

But in reality, your education is just beginning. You've only completed the first phase. Now comes the seminar on life. And believe me, it is the most interesting….and the most difficult. And the biggest mistake you can make is to think that you know it all.

In the seminar of life, you will have many more professors. Some of them you already know. Your parents, for example. I'm sure there are many of you who are amazed, simply amazed, at how much your folks have learned over the past four years! Then, there are your professors from Cabrini. Keep in touch with them. They will want to know how you are doing and might have some good advice for you along the way. And you will have many mentors along the way, people who have traveled your path before you and have learned a few things. Seek them out and listen to them.

You will find some of your professors in this lifelong seminar in some unusual places. It's certainly happened to me. When I graduated ….a few years ago….I signed up for the Peace Corps and was assigned to Ghana. I left the country in 1968 with my head filled with the latest theories on management from Boston College. When I got to Ghana, I got a crash course on the latest in agricultural technology and the Twi language that was spoken locally. So then, this city boy was sent to an agricultural cooperative to learn how to try and help the local farmers improve their crops.

What I uncovered was a treasure of immense wisdom among illiterate farmers, hunters and market woman. The calculus they adopted to measure their important life decisions, decisions on their farms, their major purchases, how they balanced social commitments, often were made in a context that meant the difference between having enough food to eat, or sending their kids to school or going into heavy debt. But it took me a while to realize what I had found.

Education is a process that will continue throughout your life, and will happen in unconventional ways in unexpected places from uncommon people.

But that education will lack direction unless it is rooted in the heart. The heart is the center of the whole person. It is the well of our emotions, our values, our spirit. Fr. Mike talked of this in his homily yesterday. The heart is what enables us to transcend ourselves and it is what connects us to others. The heart is what enables us to love, especially to love our neighbor. The heart is at the center of what you are doing here at Cabrini.

What does it mean to be people of heart, to be people of love, in this globalized, 21st century? Who is our neighbor? And how do we express this love?

It means examining how we live our lives, questioning how what we do affects others. How we consume. How we pollute. What investments we make. What policies and candidates we support. What causes we give our money to. Where we volunteer our time.

Being people of heart means doing for others. It means sacrificing for others. I have two children and I have certainly made sacrifices for them. But that is nothing compared to the sacrifices made by the millions of children orphaned by the AIDS pandemic and other tragedies in Africa and other parts of the developing world. CRS is supporting hundreds of thousands of these children who are caring for their siblings, providing resources so they can stay in their communities and not be shipped off to a far-off institution.

Being people of heart means knowing how our one human family is all connected. You know and see the tremendous hardships people are experiencing in this country. But what we're going through simply can't compare to what this crisis is doing to poor families overseas. As Pope Benedict told the world's leaders last month at the G20 summit, the poor, "whose voice has least force in the political scene are precisely the ones who suffer most from the harmful effects of a crisis for which they do not bear responsibility." I was in Haiti several months ago during the height of the global food price crisis. And the first thing I heard from my staff working there was how they were no longer able to feed their families on what we were paying them. Even though we're tightening our belts, we had no choice but to raise salaries in that office.

Finally, being people of heart calls us to be people who pursue justice. Love of neighbor encompasses justice. One should never be mentioned without the other. As the world's Catholic bishops once put it, "Christian love of neighbor and justice cannot be separated. For love implies an absolute justice, namely recognition of the dignity and rights of one's neighbor."

Or to quote a local sage, let me turn to President George, who said in her inauguration address said that at center of Cabrini's curriculum reform, "matters of justice will be central because justice matters."

What do I mean by justice? We call for justice in our pledge of allegiance, with liberty and justice for all. That's juridical justice, the right to be tried by a jury of your peers, the right to be presented with evidence against you if you're charged with a crime, the right to have access to competent legal counsel. And then there's the justice that's a sense of basic fairness. Ask any kid what that means…they're the experts. They'll be the first ones to tell you when they think they've been the victims of injustice….which is expressed in the manifesto of childhood: "That's not fair!"

But when we talk about the justice we're called to in our hearts, we're talking about something even more profound. This justice is rooted in the Bible, in the relationship between God and the people of Israel.

Justice in the Bible is not merely concerned with recognizing and preserving rights. It is centered more on making humanity right with God and fellow humans. It is about establishing and pursuing right relationships with people. It included concern for the marginal and vulnerable people in society: the widow, the orphan, the alien, the poor. It means treating people with dignity; maintaining an awareness of God's love for the outsider; fidelity to the demands of relationships in one's life; and manifesting loving kindness and compassion for all people.

At Catholic Relief Services, we have found that all of our efforts in thousands of communities in over 100 countries, all of the good work we do, cannot, will not endure without justice without the balancing of relationships.

The big word among relief and development professionals is "sustainability." What that means is that when your project is done, when you leave a community, will the health services, the agriculture cooperative, the water and sanitation system, continue to function? Or will it all fall apart from neglect, from disorganization, from the fact that one knows how to run the cooperative or how to fix the pump for the water system.

We longingly look to that day when we can leave places like Central America, Pakistan, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa, because the help we've provided, the projects we've started, are sustainable. On that day, they can say, "Thanks for your help. We'll take it from here."

But if there's one lesson we've learned over our 65-year history, it's that if we do not work for justice, all of our other good works are made of straw, liable to blow away or burn up at the first spark. We learned that lesson the hard way in Rwanda. Decades of the highest level, professionally competent economic and social development were obliterated in a matter of weeks. Our agriculture programs, our health programs, they were models for the rest of Africa. But after the genocide, these programs were wiped out, as were many of the people they served. Now we see that we should have addressed the ethnic conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis, the two warring tribes in Rwanda. Because in the absence of justice, without right relationships, that ethnic conflict was bound to erupt in bloodshed.

We know now that it is not enough to stop the fighting in Sudan—the relationships between peoples must be healed.

We will never see peace in the Holy Land until there is a just ordering of relationships among people.

So now we get it. We must be committed to justice, because justice matters. And Cabrini gets it. What you are doing here is incredible. Your curriculum reform is turning Cabrini into that "shining city upon a hill" that will be a model for Catholic colleges and universities around the country.

And what really impresses me is that this embrace of justice and solidarity with our brothers and sisters around the world isn't just a top-down mandate. Rather, it is an effort that has been embraced by your grassroots, your classmates. One of the most creative and exciting initiatives I've seen in a long time was the brainchild of a Cabrini student, Brittany Mitchell, a member of the class of 2009. She heard about an effort called Nets for Nets, and she adapted it to make a direct impact on people served by CRS. Every time the Cabrini the men's and women's basketball teams scored a basket, malaria net was donated to a community in Africa.

Let me tell you from experience, malaria is an awful disease, with high fever, chills and excruciating muscle pain. And for children and pregnant women, it is often a killer. But there is an easy way to prevent malaria: through the use of mosquito nets that prevent the insects that carry the disease from biting their victims. I just returned from Niger, where CRS is leading a major national effort to ensure that nearly all pregnant women and children under the age of five will sleep each night under a treated mosquito net, which is a very economical and effective way to prevent malaria. Nets for nets is a wonderful example of entrepreneurial justice!

The examples are many on this campus.

That's exactly the kind of heart that will ground you and sustain you as you leave here today and begin the next leg of your journey. I know it's tough to leave Cabrini and I know it's tough out there. But don't give up. Take heart! If things get rough, don't run home and move back in with your folks. Stay out there and make a difference. Volunteer as much as you can. It will make a difference in someone's life and it'll make you feel great.

Cabrini College, Class of 2009. Take heart! The big, wide world awaits you. And wherever you go, go with all your heart.