“The university must be the home of the heart,” Pope Francis told the students and faculty at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome on November 5, 2024. He visited the establishment, which is the oldest pontifical university in Rome and is run by the Society of Jesus, to inaugurate the new academic year. In a long speech, Francis emphasized the university’s mission to share God’s gratuitous love through its educational formation, and warned against allowing strong personalities or “intellectualism” to become the main focus.
“The Lord is the one who inspires and sustains the mission. It is not about taking His place with our own pretensions that make God's plan bureaucratic, overbearing, rigid and without warmth, often superimposing agendas and ambitions on the plans of Providence,” he said. “This is a place where mission should be expressed through educational action, by putting your heart into it.”
“Formation is above all about care for the person and therefore a discreet, precious, and delicate action of charity. Otherwise, educational action turns into arid intellectualism or perverse narcissism, a real spiritual concupiscence where others exist only as applauding spectators, boxes to be filled with the ego of those who teach,” he continued.
“Where are you going?”
Pope Francis visited the headquarters of the Gregorian University, which, since 1930, has been in Rome’s historic center on Piazza della Pilotta (Pilotta Square). The establishment has almost 3,000 students of around 121 nationalities, which include many seminarians who come to Rome to study and prepare for the priesthood. It has recently undergone a process of restructuring especially with the integration last May of two other institutes also run by the Jesuits: the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the Pontifical Oriental Institute.
The university is run by the rector, Jesuit Father Mark A. Lewis, and the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Father Arturo Sosa.
Three of Pope Francis’ predecessors studied at the university - Pius XII, Paul VI, John Paul I - and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger taught there.
“Have you asked yourself the question of where you are going and why you are doing the things you are accomplishing?” Pope Francis asked his audience. “St. Francis Xavier manifested a desire to go to all the universities of his time to ‘cry out like a madman, riveting the attention of those with more learning than charity' so that they may feel impelled to become missionaries out of love for their brothers and sisters saying from the depths of their hearts, ‘Lord, here I am, what do you want me to do?’”
“Don't worry, I'm not going to start shouting but the intention is the same,” Pope Francis joked. “To remind you to be missionaries for the sake of the brothers and sisters and to be available to the Lord's call, and purify everything (instruments and inspiration) in the tension to Christ.”
Going back to the charitable roots
The Pontiff asked his audience for a “sincere self-criticism” on the role and nature of the Gregorian University. “Not infrequently we have seen students from the Society [of Jesus’] educational centers acquire a certain academic, scientific, even technical excellence, yet they do not seem to have assimilated the spirit,” he said, underlining how some alumni, after becoming successful, “turned out to be different than what the educational project proposed.”
The Pope also warned against a “‘CocaCola-sation’ of research and teaching that could lead to a spiritual ‘Cocacola-sation.’”
“Unfortunately, there are many disciples of the spiritual Coca-Cola,” he noted, without elaborating. He also urged the university body to be careful “not to slide from a thought to an ideology.”
He called for the university to go back to its charitable roots to inspire its mission, as it was founded in 1551 by St. Ignatius of Loyola as a free “school of grammar, humanity and Christian doctrine.”
That inscription today “is an invitation to humanize the knowledge of faith” and to freely give what God has given us, the Pope explained.
“It is gratuitousness that opens us to the surprises of God who is mercy, freeing freedom from our yearnings. It is gratuitousness that makes virtuous the wise and the teachers. It is the gratuitousness that educates without manipulating and binding to itself, that takes pleasure in growth, and that fosters imagination,” he continued.
Resurrect hope in today's world
The Pontiff also emphasized the importance of the university’s mission in today’s turbulent world. “What are we willing to lose in the face of the challenges that confront us? The world is on fire, the madness of war covers every hope with the shadow of death. What can we do? What can we hope for? The promise of salvation is wounded,” he said. “Jesus passed through the world revealing God's gentleness. [...] We need to recover the way of an embodied theology that resurrects hope.”
He also encouraged the academics to “consider the impact of artificial intelligence on teaching and research.”
“No algorithm can replace poetry, irony, and love. Students need to discover the power of imagination, to see the blossoming of inspiration, to get in touch with their emotions and to be able to express their feelings."
This allows students to “learn to be themselves” without “shortcuts that take away freedom from decision-making, extinguish the joy of discovery, and deprive the opportunity to make mistakes. From mistakes we learn,” he explained.
“It is necessary to transform the academic space into a house of the heart. Caring for relationships needs a heart that dialogues. The heart unites the fragments and with the hearts of others a bridge is built where we can meet,” the Pope said, highlighting certain themes that he developed in his recent encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Dilexit Nos.
“The heart is needed by the university, which is a place of research for a culture of encounter and not of a ‘throw-away’ culture. It is a place of dialogue between the past and the present, between tradition and life, between history and stories.”
