The Harvard College Project on Purpose And Values in Education (PAVE) has partnered with Assumption College to promote opportunities like the SOPHIA Initiative, a co-curricular program at Assumption that asks its students to consider “big questions” of meaning, value, and purpose.

Harvard’s Project on Purpose and Values in Education (PAVE) chose to link with Assumption’s SOPHIA (SOPHomore Initiative at Assumption) program because of SOPHIA’s focus on liberal education for traditional-age college students; commitment to the education of the whole person; and its nurturing of a thoughtful and reflective stance toward the problems and challenges faced by individuals and society.

Through its website, the PAVE Project highlights 24 colleges and universities committed to providing students with opportunities for vocational reflection and the pursuit of purpose in one’s life. Its focus is on identifying and promoting promising programs that encourage reflection of meaning, purpose, and values and that have demonstrated influence on students’ moral growth.

Assumption is the only central Massachusetts-based institution featured by PAVE.

For 5 days during the Octave of Easter, a group of professed Assumptionists in the Philippines (priests and brothers), with 2 Oblates Sisters of the Assumption, had a retreat on "Brotherhood (Sisterhood)" with our Assistant General John Franck in Baguio City. Father John preached on the salient features and implications of "Brotherhood" as contained in the Letter of our Father General, Benoit Griere.

The retreat, thanks to Father John, gave new light to our understanding of "Brotherhood (Sisterhood)" in the Assumption putting emphasis on "community" as our "1st apostolate."

I'd like to express my deep gratitude to my brothers and sisters in the Assumption and to God for all these grace-filled days in Baguio City. And I'd like to express this especially through these impressions I got during this Easter Week!

“Never having to deal with bureaucracy alone”

(The following article by Paul de Theux first appeared in the April 2015 issue of L’Appel, pp. 12-13).  In 2001 a team of volunteers from the Brussels neighborhood of Koekelberg, under the leadership of the Assumptionists, launched an innovative initiative: accompanying individuals in need as they went through required administrative hoops to receive social services. The idea, simple though it may have been, answered a real need. In 15 years this non-profit organization, called “Accompagner” (“Accompany”), has lent a hand to more than 5,000 people. At the 2011 general chapter of the Assumptionists it was named one of 7 'mobilizing works' of the institute, works that, by virtue of the nature and quality of their work, serve as flagship ministries deserving of widespread support and imitation throughout the Congregation.)

Dear Friends,

Here is the latest piece of news that we received about our kidnapped brothers who have been missing for more than 2 1/2 years. The following item originally appeared in French not long ago on the website of a radio station in Bukavu, a large city in the eastern Congo, south of Goma.

"http://www.radiokivu1.org/index.php?action=emissiondetail&emission=Actus%20du%20Kivu&tokene=14&token=1430718459#

It would appear that the three Assumptionist priests kidnapped in Mbau are dead!!!

Abducted the evening of October 19 between 9-10 PM from the parish of Our Lady of the Poor in Mbau in the district of Beni, Fathers Jean-Pierre NDULANI, Edmond KISUGHU and Anselme WASUKUNDI had refused to convert to the Islam of the terrorist forces of the ADF/NALU (Allied Democratic Forces/National Army for the Liberation of Uganda, two Muslim-inspired rebel groups opposed to the current government in Uganda).

According to an ex-ADF woman rebel who spent 18 years in the bush with Jamil MUKULU (the main figure of this rebel group, a former Catholic who converted to Islam), these priests were kept in an underground prison in the Medina area (eastern Congo near Beni) where their heads were beaten with hammers and died three days after being taken into captivity."