Pope: Rome’s Jesuit-run university must be rooted in Gospel, voice of poor

ROME (CNS) — Fewer lecterns and more round tables are needed in higher education for students and staff to come together to dialogue, seek the truth and truly fulfill the mandate of a Jesuit-run institution, Pope Francis said.

“Have you asked yourself the question of where you are going and why you are doing the things you are accomplishing?” he asked students, professors, academic leaders and administrators at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University Nov. 5.

“It is necessary to know where you are going, not losing sight of the horizon that unites each person’s path toward the current and ultimate goal,” he said.

A proper vision and awareness of the Catholic university’s mission “prevents the ‘Coca-Cola-zation’ of research and teaching” and impedes a kind of “spiritual ‘Coca-Cola-zation,'” he said, alluding to the risk of a religious university’s academics and spirituality becoming worldly, commodified, unwholesome and predictable.

Education still seems to be considered a “privilege,” he said, echoing the late Father Lorenzo Milani’s warnings about schools becoming “hospitals that care for the healthy and push away the ill. Schools without the poor lose out.” 

The pope visited the university after he requested the three Jesuit-run institutions of higher learning in Rome — the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the Pontifical Oriental Institute — formally become one university. The change went into effect in May.

His lengthy talk focused primarily on the importance of its administrators discerning the proper role, purpose and goal of the university today, particularly in remaining true to the intentions of its Jesuit founders and Ignatian spirituality.

“There is a need to help you make an examination of conscience,” the pope said, emphasizing that “roots lead us, they are not to be cut.”

The pope said, “There are numerous critical elements that emerge from an honest analysis” of the university’s outcomes. 

“Not infrequently we have seen students from Jesuit centers of education acquire a certain academic, scientific, even technical excellence, yet they do not seem to have assimilated its spirit,” he said. Some alumni who have reached “high levels” of leadership also “turned out to be different from what their formation proposed.”

“This, too, requires reflection with sincere self-criticism,” he said.

Staff and professors need to discover their mission, which entails “carrying on your shoulders the history of faith, wisdom and suffering of all times, walking in the present that is in flames and needs your help and holding the future by the hand. Together: past, present and future,” he said.

“What are we willing to lose given the challenges we face? The world is on fire. The madness of war obscures every hope with the shadow of death,” the pope said. “What can we do? What can we hope for?”

“The promise of salvation is wounded,” he said, because there are people using the word “salvation” to “feed an illusion” that it is won by “bloody victories” while “our words seem to be emptied of any trust in the Lord who saves (and trust) in his Gospel.” 

“Do our thoughts imitate him or use him, I wonder, to mask the worldliness that unjustly condemned him and killed him?” the pope asked.

The world needs humility, softer words that have been “disarmed” and the realization that everyone needs each other, especially those who have different ideas, Pope Francis said.

For so many centuries, those focused on sacred studies “have looked down on everyone,” he said, and consequently, “we have made many mistakes.”

“This is a complex world, and research asks for everyone’s input. No one can presume they are enough” no matter how qualified or experienced, he said. “No single thought alone can be the perfect answer to problems.”

“Now is the time for us all to be humble, to acknowledge what we do not know, that we need others, especially those who do not think like me,” he said.  

Academia must be transformed into “a house of the heart” where there are fewer lecterns and more round tables, he said, places where all involved see themselves as “beggars of knowledge, touching the wounds of history,” recognizing the dignity of everyone without exception.

“We need a university that has the smell of the people, that does not trample on differences because of illusions of a unity that is just homogeneity,” that does not fear virtuous contamination” and hopeful imagination, he said. 

“In this university,” he said, “the kind of wisdom that must be generated cannot come from abstract ideas conceived only at a desk, but that sees and feels the troubles of concrete history,” that has contact with people’s lives and cultures, listens to “the hidden questions” and the cries of the poor.

According to a synodal style, he said, “the Gospel will be able to convert hearts to answer life’s questions,” but to do this there must be relationships based on care and “hearts that dialogue.”