Ukrainian President Petro Petroshenko said that the first time he had seen a model for people with special needs was within the walls of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU). He said this at a session of the All-Ukrainian Council on Inclusive Education.

Note: UCU built its residential college for students and staff, the Collegium, with a section for the Emmaus Center, a small community where the developmentally disabled have an opportunity to interact easily with the rest of the UCU community.

“This is not some kind of handout,” Bishop Borys Gudziak, UCU President, emphasized in an interview. “We need the gifts they have. They don’t care if you’re a rector, a doctor, or how rich you are. What they force us to confront is the most important pedagogical question of all: Can you love me?”