European universities" "
The European identity was largely formed through the intellectual irrigation produced by the universities” “” “
The University, an institution devised by the Catholic Church in the high Middle Ages, is one of the essential elements of European civilization, and a decisive factor in its development. The European identity was largely formed through the intellectual irrigation produced by the universities, from Uppsala to Bologna and Catania, from Oxford to Krakow, from Lisbon and Alcalà to Leipzig. The space of the University is the space of Europe as a whole, a space that needs to be extended and enhanced. Also from this point of view, the universities and their members, professors and students, have a unique responsibility, a mission to be assumed if they are to rediscover the intuition of the initiators of the first movement for the creation of universities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when students and professors circulated freely throughout the continent, from one university to the next. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, the universities became the promoters of nationalism. After the famous Discourses to the German nation, fourteen lessons to the University of Berlin by the philosopher Johann Fichte between December 1807 and March 1808, which long constituted the founding charter of German nationalism, teaching and research became locked into the glorification of national identity and contributed to the totalitarian catastrophes of the twentieth century. It was necessary to await the first years in the construction of a united Europe in the 1950s up till the European Single Act of 17 February 1986 to see the universities really rediscover the need to form a new and peaceful Europe, a truly European Europe. Pope Paul VI told the Council of Europe in 1977 that it “had a particular responsibility to testify, in the interests of everyone, to essential values like freedom, justice, personal dignity, solidarity, universal and reciprocal love”. Today this responsibility is that of the universities. It was recalled by Nicole Fontaine, President of the European Parliament, in 2001, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the Catholic institutes and universities in France: “Throughout history, the mission of the universities has always been that of being the promoters of universality beyond the frontiers of thought, culture, science, at the highest level of their elaboration”. The point had already been made by Jacques Maritain, who said: “Education must essentially aim not at producing a cultural type conforming to the desire of the community, but at liberating the human person”. The University as an institution must not be confined to a single discipline, nor to a single national culture. It must emancipate spirits. It must open windows and build bridges between nations and cultures. That, in essence, is the message addressed by John Paul II to the university teachers who came to Rome from all over the world for the Jubilee of Universities in September 2000: “The Church he said – which historically played a major role in the very foundation of the Universities, continues to regard them with profound sympathy, and expects from you a decisive contribution, so that this institution may enter the new millennium having fully rediscovered itself, as the place in which the dedication to knowledge, the passion for truth, and the interest in man’s future are developed in an expert way”. “Man lives a fully human life thanks to culture”, the Holy Father had declared to UNESCO in 1980. But to take the measure of the place for the Church and for the Universities in the century that has just begun, we may refer to the already cited address of Nicole Fontaine to the French Catholic universities: “To invent with lucidity the new Europe which seems confused in shape today, and which will fuse together its history and geography in an unprecedented way, Europe has a need for her university professors; in other words, it needs that exceptional capital of prospective intelligence which combines knowledge at the highest level, reflection and educational sense. I would add that Europe has a need for Christian universities, not to impose a single view of man, in our own pluralist and tolerant world, but so that the view of life that we derive from the Gospel, and that has so much marked our European history, be present in this great debate and be offered to the free choice of those who wish to be inspired by it”.
