Let’s be honest. We all do it. Everyone does it. We will keep on doing it.

Mistakes are an important part of our lives. We can’t picture a meaningful life without mistakes. Mistakes are the choices we make that enable us to learn, assess and move forward. Without them our learning curve wouldn’t exist, our existence as intelligent beings wouldn’t make sense… we would do everything purely by instinct without this wonderful capacity of looking at what went wrong and what could we have done differently.

Particularly for young people, mistakes are seen as a dreadful and haunting thing. Well… it all depends. While making mistakes is a part of growing up, repeatedly making the same mistakes and using this excuse to keep them going and going, and showing no progress or positive learning, then indeed it becomes counter productive and it’s careless behavior.

That is why rules and laws are so important. They set the boundaries of our freedom and lay the foundations of a balance for a whole group or society. For as unpleasant and hard to follow as they may be, they are the pillars of any organized structure and they exist even in animal societies. By not respecting them we interfere with the whole community and its sense of fairness, we cause harm and deceive those around us.

What is essential is to understand the reasoning behind these rules. Blindly obeying to rules and laws, in a practical sense is ok, but one who does so, does not understand why complying is important. His responsibility towards them is passive. On the other hand with an active responsibility we understand and embody the principles of that guideline and do that out of respect to others and ourselves too

“To err is human, to forgive is divine” said the great poet Alexander Pope. This is what we try to do here. We give our students room to learn, we encourage and try to accompany them in this process. And we try to forgive, because making (legitimate and innocent) mistakes and forgiving are part of the values we consider to be the core of our pastoral role.