Until today and perhaps nowhere else but at Assumption College in Worcester has Father d’Alzon’s dream of founding an institution of higher learning been realized.·It was clear that the General Chapter should include Assumption College among those works “already acknowledged as mobilizing for the entire body that we constitute” (Acts 2011, par. 99).

By inviting the President of Assumption College, Dr. Francesco C. Cesareo and his two Vice-Presidents, Mr. Francis M. Lazarus and Mr. Christian McCarthy, the PGC has begun a new chapter in our close collaboration with the University in Worcester founded in 1904. Today, this Catholic university, one of twenty-three in the New England region of the United States, has no fewer than 2600 students and has more than 150 full-time professors on its staff. The academic program includes all of the human sciences (philosophy, theology, literature, history, fine arts, social sciences, foreign languages, etc.).

However, quoting Father d’Alzon to illustrate the work currently being done in this American institution, Mr. Cesareo said: “Education is the formation of Jesus Christ in the souls of our students, just as teaching is the enlightenment of souls by the brilliant light of Jesus Christ.” The founding principles of the institutions could not be better expressed. This is it what currently inspires the desire of this mobilizing work to expand its field of activity to the entire Congregation. Of course, it is a question of assuring successors for the Assumptionists currently at the university, but also a matter of imagining and even inventing new links between the major works of the Congregation, with Bayard or other emerging works like the ISEAB of Butembo, also considered a mobilizing work. It is Father WIlfrid Kibanda who was asked to present the new institution of higher students in Africa. Today it reaches 640 students in philosophy, in development studies and in information and communication studies.