Our Commitment to Diversity

A Catholic independent school, St. Sebastian’s seeks to engage young men in the pursuit of truth through faith and reason. By embracing Gospel values in an inclusive, nurturing community and by inspiring intellectual excellence in a structured, liberal arts curriculum, St. Sebastian’s strives to empower students for success in college and in life. The ideal St. Sebastian’s graduate will be a moral and just person, a gentleman of courage, honor, and wisdom, a life-long learner, who continues to grow in capacity to know, to love, and to serve God and neighbor.

We reaffirm our commitment to advancing our School’s mission, to living our order of the day – Love God, work hard, and take good care of one another – and to learning more about and fighting ever more vigorously against the very real and terribly devastating effects of systemic racism. Cardinal Sean O’Malley reminds us, “Racism is a social and spiritual disease that kills people.” We seek to cure and prevent that disease by acknowledging and learning from our past: Maya Angelou reminds us that “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

We believe that every human being is a genetically unrepeatable gift made in the image and likeness of God, that every person has dignity, that no race is better or worse than another, that each of us is called by God to love God and neighbor, that our neighbor is every person, and that we are called to bring healing and peace to our neighbor, especially the one who needs us most.

Like Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., we believe that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  We also know it does not bend by itself. We must cooperate with grace. We must act justly for justice and we must strive to grow in diversity and unity, equity and inclusion; we are one.