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Pope Francis’ address to the academic community of the Pontifical Gregorian University
On the morning of Tuesday, 5 November 2024
Good morning, Sisters and Brothers,
Accepting the invitation of Father General, Fr Arturo Sosa SJ, I am here with you,
after the union of the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the Pontifical Oriental Institute with the Pontifical Gregorian University, now Collegium Maximum.
When the incorporation project was proposed to me, I accepted it, trusting that it would not be a simple administrative restructuring, let’s say, but that it would be an opportunity for a redevelopment of the mission which the Bishops of Rome over time have continued to entrust to the Society of Jesus.
It could not be good to proceed in this direction if you let yourselves be guided by an efficiency without vision, limiting yourselves to consolidations, suspensions and closures, neglecting instead what is happening in the world and in the Church and which requires 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 and you are only concerned about not tripping, you end up crashing.
But have you asked yourself the question of where you’re going and why you’re doing the things you’re doing?
It is necessary to know where we are going, without losing sight of the horizon that unites the paths of each one on the current and ultimate goal.
Just as in a university the vision and awareness of the end prevents the “coca-colization” of research and teaching, which would lead to spiritual “coca-colization”.
Unfortunately, there are many disciples of the “spiritual Coca-Cola”!
The spiritual father in inviting me asked me a question.
What can be the role of the Gregorian University in our time?
Reflecting on it, I recalled a passage from that letter that we find in the Office of Readings of the Memory of St. Francis Xavier, which he wrote from Cochin in January 1544:
“There are thoughts that have convinced me to come here.”
St. Francis Xavier manifests the desire to go to all the universities of his time to “cry out here and there like a madman and shake those who have more knowledge than charity” so that they may feel impelled to become missionaries for love of their brothers and sisters “saying from the bottom of their hearts:
‘Lord, here I am, what do you want me to do?’
Don’t worry, I won’t shout, but the intention is the same, to remind you to be missionaries for love of your brothers and to be available to the Lord’s call, and to purify everything (instruments and inspiration) in the tension to Christ.
The mission is the Lord who inspires and sustains it.
It is not a question of taking His place with our pretensions that make God’s plan bureaucratic, overbearing, rigid and without warmth, often superimposing agendas and ambitions on the plans of Providence.
This is a place where the mission should be expressed through formative action, but by putting the heart into it.
Formation is first and foremost the care of the person and therefore a discreet, precious, and delicate act of charity.
Otherwise it becomes a dry intellectualism or a perverse narcissism, a true spiritual concupiscence in which others exist only as applauding spectators, boxes to be filled with the ego of the teacher.
They told me an interesting story about a professor who found the classroom where he gave his lectures empty one morning.
He was always so focused that he only realized that no one was there when he got to his desk.
And the classroom was very large and it took quite a few steps to get to what looked like a “doctoral throne”.
When he saw the emptiness, he determined to go out and ask the caretaker what had happened.
This man, who had always been in awe, looked different, more self-confident…
When he pointed to the sign that had been posted on the door after he had entered, it read:
“Classroom occupied by an oversized ego. No seats available”. It was a student prank during the 1960s.
When the heart is missing, you can see it … it shows.
In the latest Encyclical, Dilexit nos, I recalled Stavrogin, one of the protagonists of Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons. I had to put in contrast, through a negative character, the proof that the heart is the place of departure and arrival of every relationship, with God and with sisters and brothers. Relationships with everyone. A proof expressed in the beautiful motto of St. John Henry Newman, inspired by the texts of St. Francis de Sales. “Cor ad cor loquitur” – the heart speaks to the heart – so dear to Benedict XVI. Returning to Stavrogin, I picked up a book by Romano Guardini, who presents him as the incarnation of evil, because his main characteristic is that he has no heart.
And for this reason “he can meet no one intimately and no one can meet him truly”.
Here, among you, precisely because of the origin of teachers and students from many parts of the world, what Guardini adds is also precious: “Only the heart knows how to welcome and give a homeland [1]“.
The origins of this educational mission still have something to say to the community of the Gregorian University to those who teach, to those who learn, to those who work in administration and services.
To do this, we need to go back to what St Ignatius’ secretary said about the motives that had led Ignatius, after the success of the College of Messina, to found the Roman College.
And it is sad – I am sorry, I am sorry to say it – that we have lost the opportunity to recover this title – “Roman College” – which would have allowed us to connect with the original intentions, which are still important, but I hope that something can still be done.
As the secretary of St Ignatius wrote: “Since all the good of Christianity and of the whole world depends on the good education of young people, for whom there is a great need of virtuous and wise teachers, the Society has undertaken the less conspicuous but no less important task of educating them”.
It was 1556, five years after a group of fifteen Jesuit students had settled in a modest house, not far from here, where Via Aracoeli now stands. On the door of that house there was an inscription: “Free School of Grammar, Humanity and Christian Doctrine.”
It seemed inspired by the invitation of the prophet Isaiah: “you who are thirsty, come to the waters. You who have no money, come” (Is 55:1).
We are livingin the time when education is a privilege, a condition that has not yet disappeared, and which makes the words of Don Lorenzo Milani about the school “as a hospital that treats the healthy and rejects the sick” relevant. But if we lose the poor, we would lose the school [2].
What does this inscription on the door of the humble house from which the Gregorian comes mean today?
It is an invitation to humanize the knowledge of the faith, and to rekindle and revive the spark of grace in man, taking care to be trans-disciplinarity in research and teaching.
Another question: are you applying Evangelii Gaudium?
Are you thinking about the impact of artificial intelligence on teaching and research?
No algorithm can replace poetry, irony and love, and students need to discover the power of imagination, to see inspiration germinate, to get in touch with their emotions, and to know how to express their feelings.
This is how you learn to be yourself, to measure yourself against great ideas, according to the measure of each person’s capacity, without shortcuts that take away freedom of choice, extinguish the joy of discovery and deprive you of the opportunity to make mistakes. We learn from our mistakes.
It is often mistakes that color the characters of our formative novels.
To return to the inscription on the door of the first seat of the Roman College, it is above all a question of actualizing that “free” in relations, methods and aims.
It is gratuitousness that makes everyone a servant without a master, one servant of another, all grateful for the dignity of each one, no one excluded.
It is gratuitousness that opens us to the surprises of God who is mercy and liberates us from greed.
It is gratuitousness that makes them wise and the masters virtuous. It is gratuitousness that educates without manipulating or binding to oneself, that delights in growth and that encourages imagination.
It is gratuitousness that reveals the nature of the mystery of God’s love, this God of love who is closeness, compassion, tenderness who always takes the first step, the first step towards everyone, no one excluded, in a world that seems to have lost its heart. And for this we need a University that smells of flesh and people, that does not trample on differences in the illusion of a unity that is only homogeneous, that is not afraid of virtuos contamination and of the imagination that revives what is dying.
Here, brothers and sisters, we are in Rome, where there is aa continuous meditation on what passes and what lasts, as expressed by the poetry of Francesco de Quevedo, a Spanish author of the seventeenth century.
Soon:
You seek Rome in Rome, O pilgrim! and in Rome itself you do not find Rome: corpses are the walls you flaunted
And polished by the years, the medals appear more like the ruins of battles of time than as Latin honor.
Only the Tiber remains, whose current, if it once bathed as a city, today it weeps with a mournful sound.
O Rome! In your greatness, in your beauty, that which was still flew away, and only what flees remains and lasts.
These verses make us think: sometimes we build monuments in the hope that we ourselves will survive, leaving signs implanted in the earth that we believe to be immortal.
And Rome is the master: of what she thought invincible, only ruins remain, while what is destined to flow, to pass – the river – is precisely what has conquered time.
Once again, as always, the logic of the Gospel shows its truth: to gain one must lose. [3]
What are we prepared to lose in the face of the challenges we fact?
The world is in flames, the madness of war covers all hope with the shadow of death. What can we do? What can we hope for? The promise of salvation is wounded.
This word salvation cannot be held hostage by those who nourish illusions by rejecting it with bloody victories, while our words seem empty of trust in the Lord who saves, in his Gospel that whispers to us words and shows us gestures that are truly redeeming.
Jesus came into the world to reveal the meekness of God.
Do our thoughts imitate him or I wonder, do they use him to cover up the worldliness that unjustly condemned and killed him? Let us disarm our words! Words, myths, please!
We need to recover the path of an incarnate theology that resurrects hope, of a philosophy that knows how to awaken the desire to touch the hem of Jesus’ cloak, to look into the edge 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 age with the life of those who read it in faith.
We need a study of the Eastern traditions, capable of stimulating the exchange of gifts between the different traditions and showing the possibility of settling differences.
In this University, a wisdom should be generated that is not born of abstract ideas conceived only on the drawing board, but that sees and feels the travails of concrete history, that has its source in contact with the life of peoples and with the symbols of cultures, in listening to the hidden questions and the cry that rises from the suffering flesh of the poor.
And you have to touch that 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 Church’s mission, must develop knowledge created by God and tested in dialogue with humanity, abandoning the “us and them approach”.
For so many centuries, the sacred sciences have looked down on everyone.
In this way we have made many mistakes!
Now it is time to be humble, to recognize that we do not know, that we need others, especially those who do not think like me. This is a complex world and research requires everyone’s contribution. No one can claim to be enough on their own, whether it is people with qualified skills or a vision of the world. No thought alone can be the perfect answer to problems faced on another level.
Fewer chairs, more tables without hierarchies, next each other, all begging for knowledge, touching the wounds of history.
In this way, 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 home of the heart. The care of relationships needs the heart that dialogues. The heart unites the fragments and with the hearts of others a bridge is built where they can meet.
The heart is necessary for 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 in the Iliad when Achilles visits his wife Andromache and son Astyanax before he confronts them.
When Astyanax sees him in his armor and helmet, he is frightened and begins to scream. Ettore takes off his helmet and leaves it on the ground, takes his son in his arms and lifts him up to his level. Only then does he speak to him [4]. In this beautiful scene we can see the steps that precede the dialogue: laying down the arms, bringing the other person to the same level, looking into his eyes. Disarming ourselves, disarming our thoughts, disarming our words, disarming our looks, and then being on the same level to look into each other’s eyes.
There is no top-down dialogue, there is none. Only in this way does teaching become an act of mercy, the nature of which Shakespeare describes so beautifully: “The nature of mercy is not to be forced, it spreads like the sweet rain of heaven and produces a double happiness, the happiness of the giver and of the receiver” [5]: both the teacher and the student, and the student. It is expected that both can learn in this way.
And this dialogue, in relation to tradition and history, must be compassionate towards the present – how many wounds are waiting to be healed! – but respectful of the past, compassionate in the present, and respectful of “yesterday”.
There is also another very beautiful image, also from the Trojan War, this time told by the Aeneid.
The War has shown its tragic style and Aeneas, when all seems lost, does two things.
To save him from the fires of Troy, he takes on his shoulders his father Anchises, an old paralyzer man, who had tried to persuade his son to leave him without taking on his weight which would have slowed down his escape.
The second thing is to protect his son Ascanius who is gripped by his right hand [6].
And so it goes on, that famous “sublato patre montem petivi” (the exact verse of the Aeneid is: “Cessi, et sublato montem genitore petivi” that is: “I resigned myself and, having lifted my father, I headed for the mountains”).
So we have to move forward.
I don’t know how many of you have seen Bernini’s statue of the scene in the Borghese Galler.
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, of the suffering of all times.
(We are) walking through the burning present that needs your help and the holding of hands with the future: together, past, present and future
The question that has been put to me, as I said before, is what the role of the Gregorian University can be today.
But in order to continue to answer it, it is necessary to help you make an examination of conscience.
Is this mission still capable of translating the charism of the Society (of Jesus)?
Is it capable of expressing and giving concrete form to the founding grace?
We cannot look back on what gave birth to us and consider it a paralysed Anchises, to be abandoned with the excuse that our present and our future cannot bear the burden.
The roots lead us, they are not cut.
This founding grace has a name: Ignatius of Loyola and a concrete formulation in the Spiritual Exercises and Constitutions of the Society of Jesus.
Throughout the history of the Society, the foundational grace has always been transformed into an intellectual experience: the composition of the will of God, who acts and guides humanity in a mysterious way, with the choices of generations of men and women on the move.
I remember the anecdote about the time when Father Ledóchowski wanted to make the spirituality of the Society very clear and published the Epitomes: everything was clear, even lunchtime…
Everything was clear.
He was a close friend of the Benedictine abbot and he sent him the first issue and he replied:
“Father Ledóchowski, you have killed the Society.”
Because he had stopped it. And the Society goes on, it goes on with discernment.
In the background is the immediacy between the Creator and his creature.
In the 15th annotation, those who propose the Exercises are asked to remain in balance, so that “the Creator acts directly with the creature, and the creature with its Creator and Lord”. (see footnote below)
Actualized in the role of the teacher, I think it is clear that your task is to promote, through study, the relationship with the Lord as your only aim, not to replace you.
Still there is the primacy service is the criterion that allows us to correct what do.
To serve God in the things we do, we must bring everything back to the end for which we were created (cf. ES 23).
Discernment is needed to purify intentions, to assess the appropriateness of means.
To put it more clearly: does this unification respond to its founding grace?
I ask myself: are those who govern and those who collaborate in harmony with his founding grace or are they serving themselves?
Finally, the sense of belonging to the Church, which requires us to put aside all our own judgements and to be ready and willing to obey Holy Mother Church in all things (cf. ES 353), a point which could include the question of intellectual freedom and the limits of research.
I also remember Father Kolvenbach’s comment on these rules.
He is in the Congregation of Procurators of ’87.
He stated that “every creativity, every spiritual movement, every prophetic and charismatic initiative is disoriented, dispersed and exhausted if it is not integrated into the goal of a greater service, that is, beyond our worldly plans, beyond our ambitions and pretensions to efficiency. Even if we put the papal stamp on it.”
The application of the rule of feeling to the Church is then very delicate, creating tensions and conflicts, where it is difficult to establish boundaries between faith and reason, between obedience and freedom, between love and the spirit of criticism, between personal responsibility and ecclesial obedience.
Every epoch has its measures here, a little less or more, a little less or more. Kolvenbach pointed out that “We cannot divide what the Lord has united in the mystery of Christ and his Church”.
The mystery is not measurable, and union with it requires constant discernment. Constant discernment. Always on the move.
An honest, profound discernment, seeking what unites us and never working for what separates us from the love of Christ and from the unity of feeling with the Church, which we cannot limit to the words of doctrine alone, clinging to the norms. The way we use doctrine often reduces it to being timeless, a prisoner in a museum, while it is moving, it is alive, it expresses the communion of faith with those who give life to the Gospel.
Generation after generation, all waiting for the realization of the Kingdom of God.
And Kolvenbach added: ” “In any case, our attitude should be this: to experience the pain of conflict and thus participate in the process that leads to a fuller communion, in order to fulfil the prayer of Jesus: ‘that they may all be one, as we are one’ (John 17:22)”. The pain of conflict and prayer. I am reminded of Father Arrupe’s dismissal, when he went to visit those who had received the land, the slaves… And what does he say? “Work to integrate these people who are outside the system, who are often fleeing their cultures. But, please, do not abandon prayer”. This was the last thing Arrupe said before he boarded the plane.
I think that these rules of discernment help to answer the question of the mission of the Gregorians, which can be summed up in one word: diaconia.
Diaconate of culture at the service of the constant recomposition of the fragments of each new era. Diaconate achieved by not avoiding the fatigue of the incarnate concept, the fatigue of the concept that seeks harmony with the Spirit, the search for communion after conflicts: internal and external conflicts.
For this reason, have the ambition of thinking that builds bridges, that dialogues with different thoughts, that tends towards the depth of mystery. The figure of the labyrinth helps me a lot.
There is only one way out of the labyrinth, from the top. And you can never get out alone. Let us now place before this teaching the passage from Matthew (cf. Mt 25:31-46), which sums up the whole search for wisdom among cultures, which was once rejected in a similar way, and which can be summarized as follows: “Culture is what remains when what has been learned is forgotten. And the culture that remains is love.
The University is a place of dialogue. Let’s try to imagine two students arriving with one book each, which they then exchange.
Each will go home with only one book, but if these students exchange a reflection or an idea when they leave, each one will take home one more reflection or one more idea.
But it’s not just about the quantity: each will be indebted to the other, each will be part of the other.
At this time, it comforts me to read St Basil’s teaching on the Holy Spirit, on how He accompanies the Church, everything starts from Him. It is Jesus’ promise that is fulfilled in time. The Holy Spirit is the harmonious composer of salvation history, He is harmony.
Like the Church, so the University must be a harmony of voices, brought about in the Holy Spirit.[7] Each person has his or her own peculiarity, but these particularities must be inserted into the symphony of the Church and her works, and only the right symphony can be made by the Spirit and by the Spirit. It is given to us not to spoil it and to make it resonate. For every mission we need servants tuned to 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 mission with an ecclesial mandate must ensure that it bears witness to this style and it is formed in this style. Tyrannical styles often 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.
Please be careful when you slip from thought to ideology. Ask yourselves if the choice of professors, the choice of programs, the choice of deans, rectors, directors and, above all, the choice of the highest academic authorities are really of such a quality as to justify the Bishop of Rome’s entrusting this University to the Society of Jesus.
For St. Ignatius, the potential of the intellectual apostolate and of houses of higher education 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, which is what St. Ignatius intended, insisting on the formative mission.
Not infrequently we have seen students in the Society’s formation centers acquire a certain academic, scientific and even technical excellence, yet they do not seem to have assimilated the Spirit.
We have often regretted the fact that some former students, after reaching high levels of government, turned out to be different from what the training project proposed.
Here too, reflection with sincere self-criticism is necessary.
As I have told you from the beginning, now with the words of Saint Ignatius I exhort you to ask yourselves: “Where am I going and to what end?” (ES 206).
And above all: “Where am I going and before whom” (ES 131).
Fix well these questions that serve to discern your intentions and possibly purify them to clarify your direction, reminding you of what characterizes this University and which could help to revise the mission of all the places of formation of the Society.
What distinguishes the Gregorian is before your eyes.
In the coat of arms of the University which you must keep attached to the inscription on the door of this humble house from which you come as the Roman College.
If you look at the coat of arms, you will see a motto that sums up the charism of this University: religioni et bonis artibus (Religion and the good arts). As was typical in Baroque words, a problem or dilemma emerges from the lemma whose solution lies in tension between the two elements. Religioni et bonis artibus. Here we find both a horizon of understanding and a question to be explored.
In fact, what Ignatius says in the Constitutions about the means is evoked, those that unite the instrument with God (expressed in the word “religio“) and those that make it available to men (expressed as art). In this case I address you who have the government and lead the mission in this University before God and the students: why do you do what you do and for whom do you do it?
St. Ignatius then emphasizes a hierarchy of these means: “The means which unite the instrument to God and enable it to be well guided by his divine hand are more effective than those which drect it towards men… because it is the internal means that give effectiveness to the external means for the end that is to be achieved” (Const. X, 813). And in the Gospel we find a question that unsettles every project: “Where is your treasure”, “There will your heart be also” (Mt 6:21).
In the Exercises, St. Ignatius takes up the theme of the spiritual primacy which we must not think of in a disembodied way, he repeatedly invites us to “ask for intimate knowledge of the Lord who became man for me, so that I may love him more and follow him in what I do” (Ex 104, 113, 130, etc.).
In fact, Ignatius does not forget the “propter nos” and the “propter nostram salutem” of the Creed – for us and for our salvation – in which the universal salvation becomes concrete and existential in this “for us”, “for me”. It is not an abstraction but the concrete, a reality that we experience, a saved life in which I and we will not be able to separate, knowing that not everything is salvation. How could there be salvation if all that guides us is the lust for power? A theme that is very present in government matters.
And in the end, Ignatius teaches us that everything must be expressed as prayer, insistent petition, that is, as a grace to be asked, not as the fruit of human effort.
And how sad it is when you see that we trust above all in human means and entrust everything today to the manager on duty. And to you who are present here, how is your relationship with the Lord? How is your prayer going? Is it really formal or is it not? How is it, where is your heart? The University must be the home of the heart, I have told you: as the heart is, William of St.-Thierry teaches us, “a force of the soul which leads it as if by a natural weight to its proper place and end” [8].
And finally, I come back to St. Francis Xavier and his desire to go to all the universities to “shake i[ those who have more knowledge than charity” so that they would feel impelled to be missionaries for love of their brothers and sisters.
I remind you: then as now, according to the Ignatian charism, culture is a mission of love.
I would like to leave you with this goad of inner verification and means.
And another thing I would add, don’t forget your sense of humor, a woman, a man who doesn’t have a sense of humor is not human.
Please, pray that beautiful prayer of St. Thomas Moore: “Give me, Lord, good digestion and something to digest.” Look for it, pray to it. I confess one thing, I have been praying to you every day for more than 40 years and it is good for me, it is good for me! Don’t lose your sense of humor.
And now, before I conclude, I entrust to you a last note of St. Ignatius, the second in the Exercises, thinking particularly of you students: “It is not much knowledge that satisfies the soul, but feeling and tasting things.” An honest evaluation of the experience of formation is based on being introduced and helped to go deeper on your own, avoiding intellectualistic labyrinths and notional accumulation and cultivating a taste for irony. Avoiding intellectual labyrinths, from which one cannot escape alone, and the accumulation of ideas, and cultivating a taste for irony.
And on this path I hope you will be able to savor the mystery. Thank you.
________________________
[1] R. Guardini , Il mondo religioso di Dostoevskij, Brescia 1980, 236.
[2] Cfr. L. Milani, Lettera a una professoressa.
[3] Cfr. Mt 10, 39; 16,25; Mc 8, 35; Lc 9, 24; 17,33; Gv 12, 25.
[4] Cf. Iliade, VI 394-502.
[5] William Shakespeare, Il mercante di Venezia, atto IV, scena I.
[6] Cfr. Eneide II, 707-729.
[7] Cfr. Basilio, Omelie sui Salmi, 29,1; Sullo Spirito Santo, XVI, 38.
[8] Guglielmo di Saint-Thierry, De natura et dignitate amoris, 1: PL 184, 379.
Footnote: Fifteenth Annotation.
He who is giving the Exercises ought not to influence him who is receiving them more to poverty or to a promise, than to their opposites, nor more to one state or way of life than to another.
For though, outside the Exercises, we can lawfully and with merit influence everyone who is probably fit to choose continence, virginity, the religious life and all manner of evangelical perfection, still in the Spiritual Exercises, when seeking the Divine Will, it is more fitting and much better, that the Creator and Lord Himself should communicate Himself to His devout soul, inflaming it with His love and praise, and disposing it for the way in which it will be better able to serve Him in future.
So, he who is giving the Exercises should not turn or incline to one side or the other, but standing in the center like a balance, leave the Creator to act immediately with the creature, and the creature with its Creator and Lord.
