Remarks by former ICJS Trustee and St. Mary's Seminary & University President-Rector the Rev. Robert F. Leavitt on June 25, 2007 at the Groundbreaking Ceremony.

It's good to be home. Ideas are born in the brain, but they need homes too. Ideas mature in different places: a written text where they achieve clarity, a university or institute where they can be explored, a synagogue or a church where they can be preached. Political ideas need a House of Representa-tives and a White House. Ideas without houses are homeless abstractions. They wander aimlessly in the imagination. ICJS was a great idea which needed a home. From the beginning it was a tenant at Brown Memorial Church. Presbyterians ex-tended their hospitality to this new idea -- gave it an address and an office for business. For a time ICJS had a room at St. Mary's Seminary & University for board meetings. Ideas mature in spaces that bring people together. Ideas need homes. Today we are right to celebrate ICJS in and for its new home.

St. Mary's Seminary has been my home for a long time. The last space I dedicated as president was the John Paul II Reading Room with its Christian-Jewish and Holocaust col-lections. That's a symbolic room for me, for the seminary, and for the Catholic Church. It's a little tributary from the stream started at Vatican II. And it's a tribute to the influence ICJS has had in the community.

The John Paul II Room will be an enduring interfaith dimension of the seminary's architecture from now on. So, I take this occasion to thank Charlie Obrecht and ICJS for their influence and for the leadership over the years of Rabbi Joel Zaiman, Mark Loeb, and others who have taught us four things -- how to think about common issues together, how to face up hon-estly to differences, how to find and unlock doors in an old house we both live in, and how to ascend and descend the stairs of memory and hope.

After centuries of regarding Jews as strangers, Christians dis-covered their own religious genealogy among the ruins of Qumran. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 began uncovering a textual road backwards to our forebears and to various strains of biblical interpretation within the diversity of Second Temple Judaism. Those discoveries influenced biblical studies, Vatican II, and interfaith studies in very important ways. They proved how much Christian and Jewish studies emerged not only from twentieth-century horrors but from an Essene library -- from learning in the desert, from patient reconstruction of fragmentary texts, and from biblical inter-pretation in common. That's what ICJS is about and that's what this home is for. The Dead Sea Scrolls opened up the past, thereby enlarging our common memories and identities. History has a way of doing that like nothing else.

One final image about memory and a library. The Wiblingen Monastery library in Ulm, Germany contains a baroque gilt statue composed of two figures: the Greek god Chronos (god of time) and a woman, Figure of History. She is holding a book, a pen, and an inkwell. Her foot has spilled the contents of a horn of plenty containing gold and silver coins. Meanwhile her left hand is resisting Chronos from tearing a page from the book. Time is doing its best to annul the past; history is bent on preserving it.

ICJS is like that woman, Figure of History. It resists forget-fulness, preserves memory, and creates a space for a unique conversation between Christians and Jews. And from that conversation already much wealth has spilled out in the form of wisdom and respect. And quite a lot of gold coins too ... to buy this house!