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Visit of the Holy Father to the Pontifical Gregorian University, 05.11.2024
This morning, the Holy Father Francis, visited the Pontifical Gregorian University on the occasion of the Dies Academicus. Earlier this year, the Pontifical Gregorian University – a renowned Jesuit-run institution founded by St Ignatius in the 16th century – merged with the nearby Pontifical Biblical and Oriental institutes. On Tuesday, 5th November, Pope Francis paid a visit to the newly-merged institution, and delivered a lengthy lectio magistralis to assembled faculty, staff, and students. He warned the university of becoming “disciples of Coca-Cola spirituality,” an analogy to beware of superficial methods of faith education.
FULL TEXT speech that the Holy Father gave during the meeting, after the greetings of the Rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University, Fr. Mark A. Lewis S.J., and by M.R.P. Arturo Sosa S.J., Superior General of the Society of Jesus and Vice Chancellor of the Faculty:
Good morning sisters and brothers,
In accepting the invitation of Father General, Father Arturo Sosa, I am here with you, after the union of the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the Pontifical Oriental Institute was realized at the Pontifical Gregorian University, now Collegium Maximum. When I was proposed the project of incorporation I welcomed it, trusting that it was not a simple administrative restructuring, let’s say but that it was the occasion for a redevelopment of the mission that the Bishops of Rome over time continued to entrust to the Society of Jesus. It could not be good to proceed in this direction if you let yourself be guided by an efficiency without vision, limiting yourself to amalgamations, suspensions and closures, neglecting instead what is happening in the world and in the Church and that asks for a supplement of spirituality and a rethinking of everything in view of the mission that the Lord Jesus has entrusted to us, losing the charism proper to the Society of Jesus. This can't go. When you walk worried just not to stumble you end up banging. But you asked the question of where you are going and why do you do the things you are doing? It is necessary to know where you are going, not losing sight of the horizon that unites the roads of each one on the current and last end. Just as in a university the vision and awareness of the end prevent the “coca-colization” of research and teaching that would lead to spiritual “coca-colization”. Unfortunately, there are many disciples of coca-cola spirituality!
The spiritual father in inviting me asked me a question. What may be the role of the Gregorian University in our time. Reflecting I recalled a passage from that letter that we find in the Office of the Readings of the memory of St. Francis Xavier, whom he wrote to Cochin in January 1544: “There are thoughts that convinced me to come here”. St. Francis Xavier manifests the desire to go to all the universities of his time to “cry here and there like a madman and shake those who have more knowledge than charity” because they feel impelled to become missionaries for the sake of their brothers and sisters “saying from the bottom of the heart: “Lord, here I am, what do you want me to do?”
Do not worry, I will not start shouting but the intention is the same, that of remembering to be missionaries for the sake of our brothers and sisters and that you are available to the Lord’s call, and everything (tools and inspiration) purify in the tension to Christ. The mission is the Lord who inspires and sustains her. It is not a question of taking His place with our claims that make God’s plan bureaucratic, overbearous, rigid and heat-free, often superimposing diaries and ambitions on the plans of Providence.
This is a place where mission should be expressed through formative action, but putting your heart into it.
To form is above all care of the person and therefore discreet, precious, and delicate action of charity. Otherwise the formative action turns into arid intellectualism or perverse narcissism, a real spiritual concupiscence where others exist only as cheering spectators, boxes to be filled with the ego of the teacher.
They told me an interesting story about a professor who one morning found the classroom empty where he kept his lessons. He was always so focused that he noticed that there was no one alone after he got to the chair. And the classroom was very large and it took not a few steps to get to what looked like a “teactor’s school.” When he had the evidence of the void, he determined to go out to ask the janitor what had happened. That man, who had always been in awe, looked different, more shrewd... When he pointed out the sign that had been affixed to the door after he entered, it was written: “Aula occupied by the immeasurable Ego. No free place.” A prank of students during the Sixties of the last century.
When the heart is missing, you see... you see.
In the last Encyclical, Dilexit nos, I recalled Stavrogin, one of the protagonists of Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons. I needed to fix in the contrast, through a negative character, the evidence that the heart is the place of departure and arrival of every relationship, with God and with the sisters and brothers. Relations with everyone. An evidence expressed in the beautiful motto of St. John Henry Newman, inspired by the texts of St. Francis of Sales. “Cor a cor loquitur” – the heart speaks to the heart – that Benedict XVI liked so much. Returning Stavrogin, I took up a book by Romano Guardini, which presents him as an incarnation of evil, because his main characteristic is to have no heart. And for this “he cannot meet anyone intimately and no one really meets him”. Here, among you, precisely because of the origin of teachers and students from many parts of the world, it is also precious what Guardini adds: “Only the heart can welcome and give a homeland.”
The origins of this educational mission still have something to say to the university community of the Gregoriana, to those who teach, to those who learn, to those who collaborate in the administration and services. For this reason we must go to what the secretary of Sant’Ignazio explained about the reasons that had pushed Ignazio, after the success of the College of Messina, to found the Roman College. And it is sad – I’m sorry, I’m sorry to say – to have missed the opportunity to recover that title – “Collegio Romano” – which would have allowed us to connect to the original intentions that are still significant, but I hope that something can still be done. The Secretary of St. Ignatius wrote: “Since all the good of Christianity and of the whole world depends on the good formation of youth for which there is a great need for virtuous and wise teachers, the Society has taken on the least conspicuous, but no less important, task of the formation of it”. It was 1556, it has been five years since a group of fifteen Jesuit students had settled in a modest house, not far from here, where now there is the Aracoeli street. On the door of that house there was an inscription: “School of grammar, of humanity and Christian doctrine, free of charge”. It seemed inspired by the invitation of the prophet Isaiah: “O you all who are thirsty, come to the waters. You who have no money, come” (Is 55:1). We are in the time when education was a privilege, a condition that has not yet become extinct, and that makes the words of Don Lorenzo Milani on the school “hospital that treats the healthy and rejects the sick” current. But losing the poor would lose school [2].
What does that inscription on the door of the modest house from which the Gregorian comes mean today? It is an invitation to humanize the knowledge of faith, and to ignite and revive the spark of grace in the human, taking care of transdisciplinarity in research and teaching. A question en passant : are you applying Evangelii Gaudium? Are you considering the impact of Artificial Intelligence on research teaching? No algorithm can replace poetry, irony and love, and students need to discover the power of fantasy, to see inspiration germinating, to make contact with their emotions, and to be able to express their feelings. In this way, one learns to be oneself, measuring oneself with the body to body with great thoughts, according to the measure of the ability of each one, without shortcuts that take away freedom from the decision, extinguish the joy of discovery, and deprive the opportunity to make mistakes. From mistakes you learn. Mistakes often color the characters in our formative novels. Returning to the registration on the door of the first headquarters of the Roman College, it is above all a matter of updating that “free” in relationships, methods and objectives. It is gratuitousness that renders all servants without masters, one servants of the other, all grateful the dignity of each one, no one excluded.
It is gratuitousness that opens us to the surprises of God that is mercy, freeing freedom from cravings. It is gratuitousness that makes the wise and the masters virtuous. It is gratuitousness that educates without manipulating and bonding to itself, that is pleased in growth and that promotes the imagination. It is gratuitousness that reveals the being of the Mystery of God love, this love God who is closeness, compassion, tenderness that always takes the first step, the first step towards everyone, no one excluded, in a world that seems to have lost their hearts. And for this reason we need a University that has the smell of flesh and people, that does not trample on the differences in the illusion of a unity that only homogeneity, that does not fear virtuous contamination and the fantasy that revives what is dying.
Here, brothers and sisters, we are in Rome, where we live a continuous meditation on what passes and what lasts, as expressed by the poetry of Francesco de Quevedo, a 17th-century Spanish author.
I quote:: I quote:
Look for Rome in Rome, or a pilgrim!
and in Rome itself you can't find:
corpses are the walls that you flaunted
And smoothed by the years, the medals
appatis more like ruins of battles
time as a Latin honor.
Only the Tiber has remained, whose current,
if he once bathed her as a city, today
He cries her with a sore n.
Or Rome! In your greatness, in your beautifuluria,
It unevolved what was firm, and only
what escapes remains and hard.
These verses make us think: sometimes we build monuments hoping to survive ourselves, leaving signs implanted in the land that we believe immortal.
And Rome is a teacher: of what they thought invincible only remain ruins while what is destined to flow, pass - the river - is precisely what has won the time. Once again, as always, the logic of the Gospel shows its truth: to gain you must lose. [3] What are we willing to lose in the face of the challenges facing us? The world is on fire, the madness of war covers all hope of death. What can we do? What can we hope for? The promise of salvation is wounded. This word salvation - it cannot be hostage of those who feed illusions by declining it with bloody victories while our words seem emptied of trust in the Lord who saves, of his Gospel that whispers to us words and shows gestures that truly redeem. Jesus passed through the world revealing the meekness of God. Do our thoughts imitate or use it, I wonder, to mask the worldliness that has wrongfully condemned and killed him? Let's disarm our words! Words, meek, please! We need to recover the path of an incarnate theology that raises hope, a philosophy that can animate the desire to touch the edge of Jesus’ cloak, to appear at the limit of the mystery. We need an exegesis that opens the gaze of the heart, that knows how to honor the Word that grows in every time with the life of those who read it in faith. We need the study of oriental traditions, capable of arousing the exchange of gifts between different traditions and showing the possibility of the composition of differences.
In this University one should generate wisdoms that cannot be born from abstract ideas conceived only at the table but that look and feel the travails of concrete history, that have their spring in contact with the life of peoples and with the symbols of cultures, in listening to hidden questions and the cry that rises from the suffering flesh of the poor.
And you have to touch this flesh, have the courage to walk in the mud and get your hands dirty. The University, if it wants to be a place and an instrument of the mission of the Church, must develop knowledge generated by God, tried in dialogue with humanity, abandoning the approach of “us and others”. For many centuries the sacred sciences have looked down on everyone. This way we made a lot of mistakes! Now it is time to be all humble, to recognize that I do not know, to need others, especially those who do not think like me. This is a complex world and research demands the contribution of all. No one can claim to be enough on their own, whether they are people with qualified skills and a worldview. No thought alone can be the perfect answer to problems that are faced on a different level. Less chairs, more tables without hierarchies, one next to the other, all beggars of knowledge, touching the wounds of history. According to this style, the Gospel will be able to convert the heart and answer the questions of life.
And to do this, sisters and brothers, it is necessary to transform the academic space into a house of the heart. The care of relationships needs the heart that dialogues. The heart unites the fragments and with the heart of the others a bridge is built where to meet. The heart is needed at the University which is a place of research for a culture of encounter and not of waste. It is a place of dialogue between the past and the present, between tradition and life, between history and stories. I would like to recall the scene of the Iliad in which Ettore before facing Achilles visits his wife Andromaca and his son Astianatte. Seeing him in armor and helmet Astianatte gets scared and begins to shout. Hector takes off his helmet and leaves him on the ground, takes his son in his arms and lifts him up to his height. Only then does he speak to him [4]. In this beautiful scene we can see the steps before the dialogue: lay down the weapons, put the other on the same plane to look him in the eye. Disarm yourself, disarm thoughts, disarm words, disarm your eyes and then be at the same height to look into your eyes. There is no dialogue from top to bottom, there is not. Only in this way does the teaching become an act of mercy, whose characteristic Shakespeare describes in such a beautiful way: “The nature of mercy is not to be forced, it spreads like the sweet rain of the sky and produces a double happiness the happiness of what it gives and of the one who receives” [5]: both the espic, the student, and the student. It is expected that both of them can learn. And this dialogue brought into the relationship with tradition and history must be compassionate towards the present - how many wounds await healing! - but respectful of the past, compassionate in today and respectful of the "yesterday". There is also another image, very beautiful, also taken from the Trojan War, this time told by the Aeneid. The war showed his tragic style and Aeneas, while everything seems lost, he does two things. To save him from the fire of Troy, his father Anchise, a paralyzed elderly man, takes his shoulders, who had tried to convince his son to leave him without charging his weight that would have slowed the escape. The second is to protect his son Ascanio seized at his right hand.[6] And so it goes on, that famous “sublate patre montem petivi” (the verse of the Eneide exact is: “Chexe, and sublated mountain motherhood” that is: “I resigned myself and, relieved my father, I would say myself on the mountains”). So we have to move on.
I don't know how many of you saw Bernini's statue at the Borghese Gallery that takes up this scene. Go and see it, there you will find a story carved in marble, but you will also discover your mission: to carry on your shoulders the story of faith, of wisdom of suffering, suffering of all times. Walk in the burning present that needs your help and holding the future by the hand: together, past, present and future.
The question I was asked how I mentioned earlier is what the role of the Gregorian University might be today, but to keep answering you need to help you make an examination of conscience. Does this mission still succeed in translating the charism of the company? can it express and give concreteness to the founding grace? One cannot look back at what he has generated us, considering him as a paralyzed Anchise to be abandoned with the excuse that our present and the future cannot bear its weight. The roots lead us, they do not cut.
That fundamental grace has a name: Ignatius of Loyola and a concrete formulation in the Spiritual Exercises and Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. In the history of the Society, the founding grace has always been transformed into an intellectual experience: to compose the will of God, who acts and guides humanity in a mysterious way, with the choices of generations of women and men in movement. I am reminded of that anecdote, when Father Ledachowski wanted to make the spirituality of the Society clear and published the epìmi: all clear, even the hour of lunch ... All clear. He was very close to the Benedictian abbot, and sent the first number to him, and he replied, “Father Ledachowski, you killed the Company with this.” Because he had stopped it. And the Company is ahead, it goes on with discernment.
In the background is the immediacy between the Creator and his creature. In the 15th anniversary, we ask those who propose the Exercises, to remain in balance, so that “the Creator may act directly with the creature, and the creature with his Creator and Lord”. Updured in the role of the teacher, I think it is clear that your task is to promote as a unique goal, through study, the relationship with the Lord, not to replace you.
There is still the primate of service as a criterion that allows us to correct what we are doing. In order to serve God in the things we do, we must bring everything back to the end for which we were created (cf. ES 23). It is necessary to discern in order to purify intentions, to evaluate the opportunity of the means. More clearly: does this unification respond to your founding grace? I wonder: who governs and who collaborates is in harmony with his founding grace or is serving himself?
Finally, the feeling with the Church that asks to put aside all one’s own judgment and to be willing and ready to obey in all respects the Holy Mother Church (cf. ES 353), a point that could include the question of intellectual freedom and the limit of research.
I also remember the comment on these rules of Father Kolvenbach. He is in the Congregation of Prosecutors of 1987. Every creativity, every spiritual movement, every prophetic and charismatic initiative is disoriented, disperses and exhausts itself if it is not integrated into the end of a greater service, that is, beyond our worldly plans, beyond our ambitions and efficient pretensions. This even if we put the papal sticker.”
It is also very delicate to implement the rule of feeling with the Church that generates tension and conflict, and where it is difficult to establish boundaries between faith and reason, between obedience and freedom, between love and critical spirit, between personal responsibility and ecclesial obedience. Every age has its measurements a little less or more here, a little less or later. Kolvenbach cified that “we cannot divide what the Lord has united in the mystery of Christ and his Church”. The mystery is not measurable, and the union that calls for constant discernment. Constant discernment. On the road, always. An honest, profound discernment, seeking what unites and never working for what separates us from the love of Christ and from the unity of feeling with the Church, which we must not limit to the words of doctrine alone, grasping at the norms. The way in which we use doctrine not infrequently reduces it to being timeless, imprisoned inside a museum, while it goes, is alive, expresses the communion of faith with those who inspire life to the Gospel. Generation after generation, all waiting for the Kingdom of God to be realized. In any case, this should be what this should be: to experience the pain of conflict, thus participating in the process that leads to a fuller communion to carry out the prayer of Jesus: “that they may all be one as we are one” (Jn 17:22). The pain of conflict and prayer. I am reminded of Father Arrupe's dismissal, when he went to visit those who received the landed, the slaves... and what does he say? “Work, to integrate these people who are out of the system, who flee so many times from their cultures. Please do not leave the prayer.” This is the last thing Arrupe said before taking the plane.
I think that these rules of discernment help answer the question about the mission of the Gregorian, and can be summed up in a word: dialyqueny. Decony of culture at the service of the continuous recomposition of the fragments of every change of epoch. A consortia realized not by avoiding the fatigue of the concept in incarnate, the fatigue of the concept that seeks harmony with the spirit, the search for communion after conflicts: internal and external conflicts.
For this reason, you have the ambition of the thought that builds bridges, that dialogues with different thoughts, which tends to the depth of the mystery. The figure of the labyrinth helps me so much in this. From the labyrinth you can only come out upstairs. And you can never go out alone. Now let us put the page of Matthew (cf. Mt 25:31-46) in the face of teaching, which summarizes the whole search for wisdom among cultures, which has once declined in a similar way, and which has been summed up in this way: “Culture is what remains after having forgotten the things learned”. And this culture that remains is love.
The university is a place of dialogue. Let’s try to imagine two students who come with a book each, who then exchange. Everyone will return home with just one book, but if these students exchange a reflection or an idea when they leave, everyone will bring home a reflection or an idea. But it is not just the quantity: each will be indebted to the other, each will be part of the other.
In this period it comforts me, it does me good to read the teaching of St. Basil on the Holy Spirit, on the way in which he accompanies the Church, everything starts from Him. It is the promise of Jesus that is fulfilled in time. The Holy Spirit is the harmonious composer of the history of salvation, He is harmony. Like the Church, so the University must be a harmony of voices, wrought in the Holy Spirit[7]. Each person has his own peculiarity, but these particularities must be inserted in the symphony of the Church and in his works and the right symphony alone can make the Spirit and the Spirit does it. It is given to us not to spoil it and to make it resonate. For each mission it takes servants accorded with the Holy Spirit and capable of making music together, the divine one that seeks the flesh, as the score seeks the instrument. This means synodality. A university that carries out its task with an ecclesial mandate must ensure that it bears witness to and form in this style. Often tyrannical styles prevail that do not listen, that do not dialogue with the presumption that only one’s own thought is the right one and sometimes there is no thought but only ideology. Be careful, please when you slip from a thought towards ideology. Ask yourself whether the selection of teachers, the offer of study programs, the choice of deans, principals, directors, and above all that of the highest academic authorities, effectively responds to such a quality, which still justifies the entrustment of this University from the Bishop of Rome to the Society of Jesus. For Saint Ignatius, the potential of the intellectual apostolate and the high-level houses was very clear. However, there are numerous critical elements that emerge from an honest analysis of the results that could make us doubt the ability to spread and multiply the faith that tends to translate into culture that is what Saint Ignatius meant, insisting on the formative mission.
We have not infrequently seen students from the formation centers of the Society acquire a certain academic, scientific even technical excellence, and yet they do not seem to have assimilated the Spirit. We have often regretted the fact that some alumni, having reached high levels of government, have proved different from what the training project proposed. In this regard, too, a reflection with sincere self-criticism is necessary. As I told you from the beginning, now with the words of Saint Ignatius I urge you to ask yourself: “Where am I going and for what purpose?” (ES 206). And above all: “Where I am going and before whom” (ES 131). Fix these questions that serve to discern your intentions and eventually purify them to clarify your direction, reminding you of what characterizes this University and that could help to review the mission of all the places of formation of the Company.
What distinguishes the Gregorian is before your eyes. In the coat of arms of the University that you must keep together with the inscription of the door of that humble house from which you come as a Roman College. If you pay attention to that coat of arms offers a lemma that intends to summarize the charism of this University: religions and bonis artibus. As was typical in baroque lmmi, a problem or dilemma emerges from the lemma whose solution lies in tension between the two elements. Religions et bonis artibus. We find here at the same time a horizon of understanding and a question to be deepened. In fact, Ignatius says in the Constitutions about the means, those who unite the instrument with God (expressed in the lemma of the word “religio”) and those who make it available to men (expressed as art). In this case I turn to you who have the government and lead the mission through this University before God and the students: why do you do the things you are doing and for whom do you? St. Ignatius then underlines a hierarchy of these means: “The means that unite the instrument to God and dispose it well guided by his divine hand are more effective than those who dispose him towards men ... because they are the interior ones that give effectiveness to the external ones for the purpose that one wants to achieve” (Const. X, 813). And in the Gospel we find a question that puts restlessness on every project: “Where is your treasure”, “Your heart will also be there” (Mt 6:21).
In the Exercises Saint Ignatius takes up the theme of the spiritual primacy that we must not think in a disembodied way, repeatedly inviting us to “ask for the Lord’s intimate knowledge that for me he has become a man, so that he may love him and follow him more” (ES 104, 113, 130, etc.) in the things that I do. Ignatius, in fact, does not forget the “propter nos” and the “propter nostram salutem” of the Creed – for us and for our salvation – where universal salvation becomes concrete and existential in this “for us”, “for me”. It is not an abstraction but a reality of which we experience a saved life in which we cannot separate knowing that not everything is salvation. How could there be salvation if what leads us is just lust for power? This is a lot of topic in government issues. And in the end Ignatius teaches us that everything must be expressed as an insistent petition prayer, that is, as a grace to ask for, not as the fruit of a human effort. And how much sadness when you see that you trust above all in human means and entrusts everything today to the manager on duty. And to you who are present here, how is your relationship with the Lord? How's your prayer? Is it really formal or not? Where is your heart? The University must be the house of the heart, I told you: as the heart is taught us William of Saint-Thierry “a force of the soul that leads it as by a natural weight to the place and to the end that is proper to it”.[8]
And finally, I return to St. Francis Xavier and his desire to go to all universities to “shake those who have more science than charity” so that they felt impelled to be missionaries for the love of their brothers and sisters. I remind you: then as today, according to the Ignatian charism, culture is a mission of love. I would like to leave you this prod of inner verification and means. And another thing I add, don’t forget the sense of humor, a woman, a man who has no sense of humor is not human. I beg you, pray that beautiful prayer of St. Thomas Moore: “Give me a good digestion and something to digest.” Look for her, pray to her. I confess one thing to you, I have been praying for you every day and it does me good, it does me good! Don’t lose your sense of humor.
And now, before concluding, I entrust you with a final note of St. Ignatius, the second in the Exercises, thinking in particular of you students: “It is not much to know that satiss the soul but to feel and taste things”. An honest evaluation of the educational experience is based on being introduced and helped to proceed alone in depth avoiding intellectualistic labyrinths and noctional accumulation and cultivating the taste of irony. Avoiding the intellectualistic labyrinths, from which one cannot go out alone, and the notionist accumulation, and cultivating the taste of irony. And on this path I wish you to savor the mystery. Oh, thank you.
’’’’’
[1] R. Guardini, The Religious World of Dostoevsky, Brescia 1980, 236.
[2] See. L. L. L. L. L. Milani, Letter to a teacher.
[3] See. Mt 10, 39; 16,25; Mk 8, 35; Lk 9, 24; 17,33; Jn 12:25.
[4] Cf. Iliad, VI 394-502.
[5] William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I.
[6] Cf. Eneide II, 707-729.
[7] Cf. Basil, Homilies on the Psalms, 29,1; On the Holy Spirit, XVI, 38.
[8] William of Saint-Thierry, De natura et dignitate amoris, 1: PL 184, 379.
Translated from https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2024/11/05/0861/01710.html
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