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“Pass from dialogue to mission and evangelization”: that’s the invitation with which Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, greeted the national delegates of university apostolate of the European Episcopal Conferences who met in the Austrian capital in recent days in a meeting promoted by the CCEE (cf. Sir 64/2004). The cardinal described two events that were promoted by the church in Vienna during his ministry and that also provided a framework of reference for the university apostolate: the “city mission” and the Katholikentag: both events, he said, “were promoted with an eye to the churches and peoples of Central Europe”. This experience, he concluded, “confirmed to us that it is not impossible to speak of the faith at the present time and in a globalized city like Vienna; we need to lose the fear of our fear, overcome the difficulty of proclaiming the Gospel. Today there’s an openness of the lay world to the Church, a widely shared curiosity and interest in what’s new in its proposal. This is the right time for the church of Vienna to pass, in its attitude to the world of culture, from dialogue to mission”. During the meeting of university chaplains, the 66 participants (from 31 nations) examined the draft of the “lineamenta” (guidelines) for university pastoral care in Europe: a document, said Msgr. Cesare Nosiglia, bishop of Vicenza and CCEE delegate for catechesis, school and university, that “closely follows the thought of John Paul II” and that is based on the idea of the university as “field of direct action of the ordinary ministry of evangelization”, within the “relation between faith and culture”. In this perspective, “the university becomes a privileged place, almost a laboratory in which the Church and culture meet, and in which the protagonists of both realities interact for the integral promotion of man, and for the new humanism proposed and recalled by the Pope that is decisive not only for universities but for the life of European society as a whole”. Another theme of the meeting was World Youth Day in Cologne (16-21 August 2005). Its preparation directly appeals to chaplains, seeing that a third of the participants generally consists of university students. Msgr. Lorenzo Leuzzi, coordinator of the committee of European university chaplains, announced the programme of the 3rd European University Day (5 March 2005), which will culminate with the Marian Vigil presided over by the Pope, and in which the universities of Lisbon, Madrid, London, Berlin, Kiev, Zagreb, Tirana, Bucharest and Bari will participate via satellite. The Day will have as its theme “intellectual research as a way for meeting Christ” and also the objective of raising the awareness of the university world about WYD in Cologne.
