Mission Statement

Our Jesuit tradition calls us to respond to today’s complex social problems. Peace and Justice Programs facilitates educational and experiential opportunities to contribute to the building of a peaceful world through the promotion of justice.

Students must let 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. They should learn to perceive, think, judge, choose, and act for the rights of others, especially the disadvantaged. We must foment intelligent, responsible, and active compassion, compassion that deserves the name solidarity…

Peace and Justice Programs aims to promote personal and social transformation. Towards the end of achieving these two objectives our work begins through the promotion of relationships. Through facilitating service, education and immersion experiences, we aim to actively engage the Xavier community in the lives of local, national and international communities. As students, faculty and staff get caught up in the lives of our local and global neighbors, in particular the lives of those individuals and communities who reside on our world’s social, economic and political margins, our programs foment and inform the desire and imperative to respond. In order to promote effective responses (and responders) we promote social analysis. As our service programs combat the symptoms of marginalization (poverty, illness, etc.), our corresponding educational processes seek to explain the political, economic and social structures that cause such phenomenon. Our educational processes and experiential programming seek to engender constructive thinking and action towards promoting the structural conditions under which individuals and communities can attain their potential (peace). Such programming requires thinking about the challenges and opportunities privilege presents in promoting change, the opportunities and limitations of service, and the need to ensure participatory processes to resolve local and global problems. We hope that our programming, by promoting relationships and education, transforms participants, equipping and motivating them to transform the world.