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On Saturday, May 14, the Most Rev. Salvatore J. Cordileone, Archbishop of San Francisco, will serve as Commencement Speaker at 91����’s annual graduation exercises. During the event, His Excellency, who heads the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop’s subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, will receive the College’s highest award, the Saint Thomas Aquinas Medallion, in recognition of his lifelong fidelity and service to the Catholic Church.

“We are honored and delighted that our longtime friend Archbishop Cordileone will be with us for Commencement, especially as this visit comes so soon after the publication of Pope Francis’s recent exhortation on marriage, Amoris Laetitia,” says 91���� President Michael F. McLean. “Nationally, Archbishop Cordileone is known for the clarity of his teaching about marriage, the family, and the unborn, and the courageous witness he gives in their defense. In the Bay Area, too, he serves his flock as a faithful shepherd. We very much look forward to His Excellency’s visit and to his remarks at Commencement.”

Commencement will mark the Archbishop’s third visit to 91����. In 2008, when he was an Auxiliary Bishop in the Diocese of San Diego, he served as the College’s Convocation Speaker. Less than a year later, he returned to campus for the Dedication of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel, where he served as the principal celebrant and homilist at a Mass for the College’s alumni. “The great virtue of 91����,” Archbishop Cordileone said in his homily, “is that it forms young people in the Faith in all of its dimensions — intellectual, spiritual, and cultural — such that young people learn to listen to the Lord, and so they can successfully discern that voice and respond to God’s call in their life.”

At this year’s Commencement exercises, the 42nd in the College’s history, Archbishop Cordileone will address a graduating class of 79 students who hail from across the United States and abroad. Upon completion of the College’s rigorous, four-year curriculum, which includes mathematics, natural science, Latin, literature, philosophy, and theology, each graduate will receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in liberal arts. These new alumni will go on to a wide variety of pursuits including law, medicine, business, military service, education, public policy, and journalism as well as the priesthood and religious life.