On the path towards knowledge

“Dear young people, you are the future of Europe”. With these words the Pope greeted 1,500 university students from 31 Countries on July 11. The youth attended the First European Meeting for university students held in Rome July 9-12 on the initiative of the Catechesis – school-university of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences (CCEE) on the theme: “New Disciples of Emmaus, Christians in universities”. In addressing himself to the students Benedict XVI said, “In the years of academic study you are called to invest your greatest resources, not only on an intellectual plane, in forming your own personality and contributing to the common good”. “Working for the progress of knowledge”, is “universities’ specific vocation which demands high moral and spiritual qualities, in the face of the vastness and complexity of the knowledge that mankind has at its disposition”, His Holiness said. “The new cultural synthesis, which is currently being forged in Europe and in the globalized world, needs the contribution of intellectuals capable of bringing discussion of God back to the classroom”. As relates to university pastoral activity the Pope called for “further steps” for “a more harmonious approach, promoting involvement and communion of the various experiences in different Countries”. The Pope invited students and their professors “to create workshops of faith and culture” and to “love” their own universities, as they are “the training grounds of virtue and justice”. In his opening remarks Benedict XVI expressed a “special” thought to Cardinal Vicar Agostino Vallini, conveying his “gratitude for the precious service that Rome’s university pastoral activity renders to the Church in Europe”. Real crisis. “The true cause of world crisis is the crisis of the human person, the crisis of morality, the lack of spiritual values”, said Alexander Studenikin, from Moscow’s State University. In post-industrial society, that can be defined as the “society of information”; the speaker remarked, the paradigm that has taken roots is “the relativistic approach”. Under this pressure, “only the Church has preserved a set of values that enables man to distinguish good from evil”. Both Benedict XVI and Patriarch Kirill, the speaker said, highlighted “the risks pertaining to scientific and technological progress in the context of the cultural crisis”. In the debate, that often leads to a clash, opposing science and faith, the matter at stake “is the notion of the quality of human life”, Studenikin remarked. “Unwanted guests?” Denying the “Christian roots” of Europe entails committing “a historical mistake” that consists “in something similar to revisionism or negationism, namely the negation of the Shoah, said scholar Pilippe Nemo, from the Philosophy and Economics Research Centre in Paris. “Denying the identity of a community means jeopardizing its future”, thus Nemo defined revisionism and negationism. “The denial of the Shoah – he explained – tends to trivialize the sufferings of the Jews and assimilate them to other peoples”, while negationism “denies Jewish identity”. In the same way, said the speaker, “the denial of the Christian roots of Europe tends to transform Europeans who consider themselves Christians – whether they are believers or whether they identify with the roots of their own tradition – into superfluous and potentially unwanted guests”. Thus, Nemo declared, “a different identity is imposed on Europeans by force”. No to “escaping” and to the “primacy of technology”. “The future of Europe will largely depend on Christians’ presence inside the universities”, in order to “coordinate academic research from an ethical and moral standpoint”, declared Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, who presided over the Mass officiated before the audience with the Pope. “At times university life is viewed as opposing faith life”, His Eminence said. Hence the need to overcome the temptation of “escaping from reality”, which in academic environments risks reducing “reality and science to a purely functional dimension”, while it is necessary to bring “realism” inside contemporary culture, to which “Christianity can give a major contribution”. Peter Koslowski, from the University of Amsterdam also delved into the meaning of the terms “culture” and on the “primacy of technology”. “Technology”, he said, “belongs to the realm of culture, and not to the realm of nature, although it is developed with the aid of natural sciences”.