universities" "
The French philosopher Jacques Maritain (the 30th anniversary of whose death is being celebrated this year) wrote: “The University must teach universal knowledge, not only because its architecture embraces the sum of the highest fields in human knowledge, but also because in each university worthy of the name the spirit of teaching is an impulse to universality, since it tends in a completely disinterested way to the pure knowledge of the truth and thus asks its professors to develop for themselves, and to communicate to their students, a sense of the connections and correspondences that exist between all the various regions of the universe of knowledge”. The mission of the university is to form spirits, give them their coherence, unify them. The universities are the crucibles of culture. Their value depends on teaching based on research. Culture, teaching, research: through this trinity the influence of the university is diffused in time and in space. Msgr. Gérard Defois, archbishop of Lille, former Rector of the Catholic University of Lyon, says: ” The task of the universities is to open spirits to technical fields of knowledge and to their spiritual significance. As such, they are places not just of the transmission of knowledge, but also of the creation and diffusion of culture. They are at the heart of the questions of our time”. The fundamental values of the universities are the progress of knowledge, the cultural growth and development of the person and of the society to which he belongs and which he helps to structure. Precisely for that reason the university is a place of dialogue. “The University too, no less than other institutions said John Paul II during the Jubilee -, feels the anguish of our time. And yet it remains irreplaceable for culture, so long as it does not lose sight of its original role as an institution deputed to research and to a vital formative and I would say “educational” function especially to the benefit of the young generations. This function must be placed at the centre of the reforms and adaptations which this ancient institution may also need to adjust to the times”. The Church would like dialogue to become a habitus for thought. The university should play a role of forming the citizen by preparing him for universal dialogue. In this way the risks of a culture of uniformity, with its paradoxical corollary of fragmentation and inward-lookingness, are removed. Instead, the university becomes the creator of a true culture of relation, of contact between men, and of indispensable dedication to the common good. The dialogue with the cultures of our time is more than ever urgent today. The destiny of Europe and the world is at stake on this terrain, and the university, called by definition to universality, has a singularly important mission to perform. Dialogue between cultures, dialogue between religions, dialogue between disciplines, dialogue between faith and culture, between faith and reason, this is the mission of the university, in other words, that of “opening the frontiers of the spirit” to quote the title of the fine book by Louis Gardet (1985). Universitas implies Humanitas, i.e. an ethic of responsibility. The human being must be taken in the totality of his person. That is the sense of the mission of the universities as “cultural laboratories”, according to the expression used by the Pope in his address to university teachers on 9 September 2000. (The previous article on the universities is in Sir no. 60 of 12/09/03)
