Catholic colleges and universities, like non-religious academic institutions, are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and truth. However because Catholic colleges and universities take their inspiration from the Gospel, that pursuit has a different orientation. Its specific point of reference, direction and purpose is perhaps best captured by the phrase ""a preferential option for the poor."" This phrase, coined by the Latin American bishops at their 1979 conference in Puebla, Mexico and since then central to the vocabulary of the Catholic Social Tradition, simply means that we as individual