Thank you, father Charles, and thank you to all the board, the faculty, all the staff, and congratulations to all the graduates today.
It's a beautiful thing to see how you've taken this, vision forward.
I think twenty years ago, we never could see too far into the future.
We never saw it developing so beautifully, with such a great impact.
And I want to say thank you and congratulations to everyone throughout the years who have carried on that vision.
I think we were a small group of priests during the nineteen nineties, working at a retreat center.
We had a lot of ideas, and we're running into a lot of problems.
We were trying to give retreats, counsel marriages, give spiritual direction.
And we found that time and again that there was a resistance, that there was so often, we found, an inability of people to flourish in the faith and to really grow closer to God.
And, we knew that we didn't have all the tools.
We had been educated in theology, but we had an inkling that we also needed much more formation in psychology.
And so although we knew the moral teachings and we knew the goal that we wanted everybody to get to, I think we found ourselves in this murkier area of human freedom and the things that impede human flourishing were affecting so many people.
We were dealing with problems of families of origin, of abuse, of trauma, no general fallout from the culture, which was definitely not supportive of people growing in faith.
We knew that we had to do something, and we tried a few things, gathering together psychologists who happened to be Catholic and trying to elicit ideas from them, but we didn't have a lot of success.
They didn't have an integration of what they did every day for a living with their faith that they practiced every Sunday.
So we started to gather together some very good people, like Paul Bitz and Bill Nordling and Ken Schmitz and father Benedict Groeschel, and, started brainstorming with all of them.
And we had the idea that there ought to be a different way to do psychology than what we were seeing at the time.
This dichotomy between faith and life, this separation between what psychology could offer and what our Catholic faith that we knew was so true, was offering people.
And, well, the ultimate after a while was the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, and somebody needed to be made president, and I was picked because somebody had to raise money.
I didn't have any experience in psychology, but, somebody had to be responsible for paying the bills, so that was me.
It's so beautiful to see that the vision has stayed the same and yet expanded over the years, that there's a way to do psychology that serves the human person, that helps him flourish, that starts from the vantage point that he's made in the image and likeness of a good God, that he's redeemed by the mercy and the sacrifice of Jesus, and that he's destined for eternal happiness in heaven.
It's a psychology that's grounded in the truth about the human person that we know by reason and by Jesus's revelation of the father.
And this is the noble task that all the graduates have, to help every person and every client that you have to regain the freedom, so they can live as a child of God.
That they can pursue that vocation to which God has called them all, the purpose God created us for.
So don't forget that the people that you serve all throughout your life are people that God loves, and that they have their dignity not because of their power or their money or the influence that they may have, but because Jesus died on the cross for them.
And they have an incomparable worth because of that fact.
I'm very proud to be associated in some small way with this great work that the presidents who came after me have made so strong and have developed so well.
And I wanna ask God's blessing on all the graduates and all the work that you'll do.
May God pour out his blessings on you and all the people you serve.