The Mission of the Year of the City A Reflection of our Mission as a Jesuit Catholic UniversityThe Year of the City is an initiative that has deep roots in Loyola’s mission as a Jesuit Catholic University. Inspired by the example of St. Ignatius Loyola and informed by the broader Catholic intellectual and social traditions, Loyola seeks to educate persons of compassion and competence who can address the pressing needs of our communities and our world. Far from being an isolated learning aim, this commitment lies at the very heart of a Loyola education. The “essential vocation” of a Jesuit university, writes Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., “is tirelessly to seek the truth and to form each student into a whole person of solidarity who will take responsibility for the real world.”[1] This requires, among other things, that students allow “the gritty reality of this world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering, and engage it constructively.”[2] For this formation to be sufficiently comprehensive and effective, it must be encompassed within a commitment of the university as a whole to take into its own life the sufferings and authentic strivings of the wider human community. This commitment to solidarity—as an educational goal and institutional priority—is expressive of an incarnate spirituality that honors the dignity of all persons and is informed by God’s special love for those who are poor and oppressed. Thus animated, St. Ignatius deliberately chose the city over the monastery as the setting for the apostolic work of the Society of Jesus. Following Ignatius, we, too, choose the city as the primary setting for our own apostolic work by way of the Year of the City. In rededicating ourselves to the context we have inherited from history, we renew and deepen our commitment to Loyola’s fundamental educational aims. top A time for reflecting critically about the social realities of urban life in our time and in our city “Every Jesuit academy of higher learning,” writes Fr. Kolvenbach, “is called to live in a social reality…and to live for that social reality, to shed university intelligence upon it and to use university influence to transform it.”[3] The immediate social reality that Loyola inhabits is an urban environment that is characterized by a wealth of historical and cultural riches. Its place within the histories of our nation, the American Roman Catholic Church, and the Society of Jesus are well-established. Its art and architecture, its universities and museums, and its neighborhoods and cultural centers are sources of enormous civic pride and objects of national and international attention. The Year of the City offers a unique occasion to appreciate these treasures and enjoy them more completely. Like many urban environments and, perhaps, moreso than most, Baltimore is also characterized by a variety of social ills. High rates of poverty, unemployment, violent crime, drug addiction, school drop-out, and family breakdown overwhelm many of its neighborhoods, institutions, and resources. Widespread racial tensions, of various kinds and intensities, undermine the bonds of civic friendship and increase the level of distrust within communities. Collectively, these ills contribute to a social environment that is not conducive to the development of many persons and communities. In a special way, these concerns are the focus of the Year of the City. Through department/division-specific initiatives and community-wide events, these concerns and similar ones will be made the objects of comprehensive study and discussion. In classrooms and public fora, in residence halls and city streets, we will explore and model ways to study these matters in an orderly fashion—in collaboration with community partners, in conversation with the many academic disciplines, in appreciation of the wisdom of the saints, and in full awareness of the dignity of every human being and the priority of the common good. By way of this shared activity, we aspire to cultivate in our students the intellectual skills they will need to be competent servants of faith and promoters of justice in the specific social contexts they later choose for themselves. Moreover, we hope to prepare ourselves, as an academic community, to make these social realities more consistently objects of our ongoing study and concern. top A time to reflect upon the role of a Jesuit Catholic academic community in an urban environment The study of these social realities reaches beyond itself to social commitment that is expressive of Loyola’s distinctive mission. Thus, beyond celebration of the many goods of city life, the Year of the City entails a call to reflect upon and enact our distinctive role as a Jesuit Catholic university within the setting of the city. This will be answered, in part, in terms of the many forms of service within the city that persons and campus groups choose to undertake. More significantly, it will be answered in terms of the day-to-day work that each person and department already contributes to the life of the university. Among other things, the Year of the City is a time for sustained reflection upon the deeper meaning of our work in light of the fact of the suffering and exclusion of so many of our neighbors. It is a time to think freely and courageously about the kinds of transformations that might render our work a greater source of healing in our city and our world. Fr. Kolvenbach reminds us that the implementation of these aims “is not something a Jesuit university accomplishes once and for all. It is rather an ideal to keep taking up and working at, a cluster of characteristics to keep exploring and implementing, a conversion to keep praying for.”[4] The Year of the City allows us to concentrate on this ideal in a rather deliberate way. It does so not in the abstract but through the very activity of striving together to live more faithfully our commitment to solidarity. The food for our discernment, then, will be served by the many departments and divisions that endeavor to make their own distinctive contributions to the Year of the City. And it will include the many relationships—across the university and with partners in the city—that arise from our efforts to support and inspire works of social renewal. A primary outcome of the Year of the City is the institutionalization, within and across all sectors of the Loyola community, of priorities and commitments that will sustain this focus over time and continue to shape our identity as a socially-responsible Jesuit Catholic university. top References [1] Kolvenbach, Peter-Hans. “The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Higher Education.” Conf. on Commitment to Justice in Jesuit Higher Education. Santa Clara University, Oct. 6, 2000. The Santa Clara Lectures Vol. 7 No. 1. 11 [2] Kolvenbach, 10. [3] Kolvenbach, 14. [4] Kolvenbach, 14. top | 
