Remarks at the President’s Society Dinner
September 23, 2006
Father Jonathan DeFelice, O.S.B.
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Good evening!
It is difficult for me to express to you the enormous gratitude contained in that simple greeting. For my monastic confreres and myself, for whom the journey to this annual dinner is but a short walk from our monastery, this evening is so very, very good indeed; for on this night we are surrounded by those people who love Saint Anselm College the most. At every turn, at every table, in each tuxedo and tailored gown we see the closest and dearest friends of Saint Anselm. This strengthens our hearts in ways you may never know.
Certainly your generosity makes our work possible, but more than that, your dedication increases our own, and your love for this school stays with us and with our students long, long after you leave this night. So before I say anything else tonight, let me begin by saying from the bottom of my heart, and the hearts of all who serve at Saint Anselm: Thank you! Muchas Gracias! Merci! Dankeschoen! Mille Grazie! Vobis Gratias ago! Shey-shey!
Those last two languages, by the way, are from the first language we ever taught at Saint Anselm College, Latin, and the most recent language we began teaching this fall, Chinese. This blending of our College’s most valued traditions with important innovations is at the heart of what we celebrate together tonight.
Many of you will remember that five years ago we debated whether we should even hold this annual event. How, we asked ourselves, can we revel in black ties and sip champagne while the rubble of the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon still smoldered, while the perished bodies of so many of our countrymen had yet not been recovered, and while the very soul of our nation was so freshly and so profoundly wounded. How could we celebrate while we felt such horrible grief?
Oddly enough, it was our friends in New York City, those impacted most immediately and significantly by the awful tragedy that we would come to know by its ominous date, who encouraged us not to cancel the President’s Society Dinner in September of 2001. “We not only want you to hold this event,” they told us, “we need you to. We need to be able to drive from this city and be with a community that we cherish, and with the people of faith and hope who have always supported us in good times and in bad, in prosperous days as well as sorrowful ones. We long,” they told us, “to return to Saint Anselm College.”
And so we gathered that evening in shared sorrow, faith, hope and, yes, even joy. We gathered as people of faith and determination. Even while we were uncertain about many things, we were more certain than ever before of the value and the importance of our College’s mission of preparing young people not just to succeed, but to serve, not just to face the future, but to lead others into it, and to do so with the certainty and the courage that can only come from faith. All colleges and universities dispense knowledge. Saint Anselm has always made it its mission to cultivate wisdom. And now as never before, we understood that the world would need the wisdom and strength of a new generation of leaders: teachers, nurses, doctors, entrepreneurs, scientists, lawyers, business managers, policemen, clergy, soldiers, social workers, and statesmen.
Years before September 11, 2001, Saint Anselm had already dedicated itself in an innovative and courageous way of fulfilling this mission of fashioning leaders for our nation and our world. Ten years ago a small group of us began to envision the founding of an institute of politics at Saint Anselm. I will not bother you tonight with the remarkable coincidences, turns of good fortune, abundant setbacks, bumps in the road, and unexpected twists and turns through which we persevered. Suffice it to say that a small, but significant group of people began to share our vision. One of those people was the man who is now New Hampshire’s senior senator, and one of our state’s and our nation’s most tireless, dedicated and wisest public servants, Senator Judd Gregg who is unfortunately unable to be with us this evening, but who has been and continues to be one of our greatest advocates.
On that previously serene morning of September 11, 2001, when the airplanes crashed into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, Saint Anselm students crowded in front of televisions in the brand new café of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, which had been officially dedicated only four days before. It was a profound and paradoxical coincidence. Young people, numb and shaken by the indescribable realities and sudden uncertainties that loomed on the screens before them, stood in a facility dedicated to cultivating civic understanding and democracy, and preparing them to become the ethical leaders that our world would so desperately need.
For five years prior to that day, the founders of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm had been looking towards the future; examining the nation and its communities, assessing the diminishing levels of civic engagement, and explaining to all those who would listen the necessity for a place permanently devoted to the study and promotion of democratic citizenship. They envisioned an institute where the walls of the classroom could dissolve, where every lesson would be a practicum, where the mission of teaching and practicing democracy could be extended to people of every age and walk of life, and where the only evaluation would be whether positive change had been effected in the lives of people.
Together, with your support, from the hollow, brick shell of a former army reserve facility, we fashioned just such an institute, and then, but four short days from its dedication, we beheld and understood as never before the profound significance of our undertaking. The lessons of that Tuesday morning were as ancient as they were sobering. Indeed, there were and perhaps always will be assaults on democratic freedoms, whether from airplanes converted to missiles, young men converted to murderers, or simply common purposes corrupted into complacency. If democracy is to endure and flourish, people need to shoulder together the plough of liberty, and cultivate the values that are the hope and heritage of this country.
Awakened to the profound necessity and good of their enterprise, the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, under extraordinary leadership, set forth from that morning with a passion and a determination to engage, educate and empower citizens. Since then, in its inaugural five years, The New Hampshire Institute of Politics has encouraged in the lives of our own students, and those of local secondary and primary school students, the profound importance of their civic responsibilities, and it has offered them a wide variety of opportunities to engage locally, regionally and nationally in the practices of those responsibilities. Tonight I commend those who believed in the vision -- our Trustees especially Kevin Harrington and Lucy Flynn; members of our college administration, especially former Executive Vice President Dr. Gary Bouchard, and Vice President for Finance, Father Mark. I commend too, the Institute Staff, the many Saint Anselm faculty who support and foster its work, and in particular the courage and vision of its founding director Dr. Dale Kuehne, and its current executive director Ms. Anne Botteri.
Everyone should understand that the New Hampshire Institute of Politics is a natural extension and complement to the College’s core curriculum, a curriculum that invites students to explore the most difficult human questions as they reflect on human greatness in the origins and developments of civilization from the ancient Greeks to the American Revolution and beyond. As Senator Gregg has so aptly stated, “People have to be informed about where our country came from in order to understand where we are and where we should be going; and Saint Anselm College understands this.”
The improbable founding and the remarkable work of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, as well as that of Saint Anselm College, is far from over. In truth, the work of the Institute has just begun, and it is a significant part of what is bringing the work of Saint Anselm College, in this its 117th year, towards maturity. Tonight I make my first public appeal for a much needed endowment that will sustain the work of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in perpetuity, and I ask that you continue to give your support to this significantly important innovation at our college. For notwithstanding the ill-advised attempts of the DNC to take away our first-in-the-nation primary status, you all enjoyed pre-dinner refreshments this evening in the place that will remain one of the very epicenters of national presidential decision-making, and one of the most innovative centers for the cultivation of democracy’s future in the country.
All of us can remember with uncanny detail where we were on September 11, 2001, and in the past few weeks we have had movies and news documentaries to remind us of what we will surely never forget. But what we celebrate tonight is the extraordinary work of education. And certainly education can be described as the recalling of the past, to help us understand the present, in order to affect the future. Whenever I recall September 11, 2001, I will remember not just staring in disbelief at a television screen, but gathering at noon that day to celebrate mass in our Abbey Church crowded beyond capacity with Saint Anselm students, faculty and staff -- people uncertain what to do, but sure of where to turn.
May the God who consoled us that day continue to bless the good work of our College, the precious lives of all of our students and our alumni. May He reward your generosity and may He continue to bless and heal our great nation.
God bless you all and God bless America!