The Mission

Fr. Dennis Gallagher, A.A. '69, Vice President for Mission

Of Mission Statements and Yogi Berra (Winter 2004)

Catholics of a certain age cannot help but remember the first question of the Baltimore Catechism:

Q: Why did God make me?

A: God made me to know, love, and serve Him in this life and to be happy with him forever in the next.

Whatever else can be said for it, the old catechism did not hedge its bets about the proper end (finis) and ends (telos) of human life.

Everywhere you look these days, organizations are working on their mission statements for reasons not unrelated, perhaps, to the first question of the catechism. Unless we know who we are and what we should be about, life’s progress, uncertain as it is, becomes all the more precarious. How do I know where to go when I don’t know where I’m going, as Yogi Berra might have said.

If mission statements are the sine qua non of organizational development, their very ubiquity, especially as it applies to Catholic higher education, leaves me wondering. In the same way that we speak incessantly about community at a time when we are less sure of what we most deeply hold in common, and of commitment when the grounds for enduring relationships are more questionable, does our preoccupation with mission statements point to a loss of clarity about who we are and what we should be about?

If we at Assumption struggle for clarity, we do so in the context of a larger cultural crisis of meaning. We live in what one commentator calls “the runaway world.” Of all the distinguishing characteristics of our time, the fact that we do not know where we are going, that we have no shared sense of the direction of our history, may be the most telling. One effect of this is a tendency to bracket the future and to seek refuge in the apparent security of the present moment. No wonder, then, that the activity of giving shape to the future in the form of mission statements can be so painstaking.

For all its clarity, the Baltimore Catechism answered our questions even before we had a chance to ask them—an approach not especially congenial to the proper business of a college or university. It would be ironic, nevertheless, if the longstanding mission of the Catholic college to encourage sustained reflection on the goals of human life should be obscured at precisely the moment when such reflection is most needed.