2023 Symposium Awards
Collegium Visionary Award
Dr. Loreto Peter Alonzi
Dr. Alonzi is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Dominican University. He holds a doctorate in Economics from the University of Iowa. Dr. Alonzi also accepted the call to be an Associate of the Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters. He considers himself both a teacher and scholar who introduced students to the world of research into futures markets and financial markets. Dr. Alonzi has written and spoken on the pedagogy of teaching economics and the Catholic intellectual tradition. Dr. Alonzi served as a professor at Dominican University in the Brennan School of Business for twenty-two years retiring in August of 2021. He has taught both graduate and undergraduate students in the US and abroad. Prior to a fruitful career in teaching and scholarship at Dominican University, Dr. Alonzi worked in industry at the Chicago Board of Trade.
Sr. Mary Clemente Davlin Diversity Leadership Award
Dr. José Blanco F.
Dr. Blanco is an associate professor in the Department of Fashion Merchandising and Design. His research focuses on dress and popular culture in the second half of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on male fashion. José is also the general editor of the multi-award winning four-volume encyclopedia Clothing and Fashion: American Fashion from Head to Toe, a co-author for the textbook Guide to Producing a Fashion Show, and co-editor of the recently published Fashion, Dress and Post-Postmodernism. He was born in San José, Costa Rica and received a PhD in Theatre from Florida State University.
Bradford O'Neill Medallion for Social Justice
Homeboy Industries
Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ (founder and honoree)
“We imagine a world without prisons, and then we try to create that world.”
Father Greg Boyle, Founder
A native Angeleno and Jesuit priest, from 1986 to 1992 Father Boyle served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, then the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles that also had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city.
Father Boyle witnessed the devastating impact of gang violence on his community during the so-called “decade of death” that began in the late 1980s and peaked at 1,000 gang-related killings in 1992. In the face of law enforcement tactics and criminal justice policies of suppression and mass incarceration as the means to end gang violence, he and parish and community members adopted what was a radical approach at the time: treat gang members as human beings.
In 1988 they started what would eventually become Homeboy Industries, which employs and trains former gang members in a range of social enterprises, as well as provides critical services to thousands of men and women who walk through its doors every year seeking a better life.
Father Boyle is the author of the 2010 New York Times-bestseller Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. His new book, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship, was published in 2017.
He has received the California Peace Prize and been inducted into the California Hall of Fame. In 2014, President Obama named Father Boyle a Champion of Change. He received the University of Notre Dame’s 2017 Laetare Medal, the oldest honor given to American Catholics. Currently, he serves as a committee member of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Economic and Job Recovery Task Force as a response to COVID-19.
Learn more at the Homeboy Industries website.
Fr. Boyle will not be present at the Caritas Veritas Symposium, but will headline an evening of stories of radical kinship, healing and forgiveness on December 5.