Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Rome (Fides Service) – “Probably Europe has never seen a Symposium of this type. We have come from more than 40 countries to discuss and re-launch dialogue between University and Church. A dialogue which despite alternate vicissitudes has existed down through the centuries”. This was how Bishop Amedee Grab, president of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences CCEE, introduced the work of an international symposium on the theme University and Church in Europe (17-20 July) which opened yesterday at the Pontifical Lateran University with the participation of more than 2,000 delegates. At the start of the third millennium and on the eve of a significant page in the history of Europe “we feel the responsibility to search together for that light of which our history has urgent need” Bishop Grab said, stressing that the time has come for “new evangelisation and inculturation of Christianity in our continent” and that “universities are the first place for this new encounter between Gospel and culture”. The crucial point underlined by Bishop Grab was a “disintegration of the project of a universal science proper to the great universities”, in fact precisely “when the European Union is enlarging many feel the need to affirm their proper identity, culture and regional language. It is very difficult to manage the union respecting at the same time all the differences”.
“Europe is at a cross roads in her life and the feeling that all of us Europeans are at a fundamental hairpin bend in history, is certainly becoming more widespread and acute” said the Rector of the Italian Catholic University Sacro Cuore, Professor Lorenzo Ornaghi. To understand and to a certain degree anticipate the great transformations and new orders which are being consolidated it is necessary to “reflect deeply not only on the historical and present day bonds between university and Church in Europe, but also on the many positive opportunities which a renewed relationship between them can guarantee to the European constitutional reality and the possible role of Europe in the construction of a political-economic world order…Culture will show which path we must follow so that Europe does not stand immobile and irrelevant at the crossroads.”
Cardinal Karl Lehmann, president of the German Bishops’ Conference, was entrusted with the Symposium prolusion focused on the theme of dialogue “fundamental for a new culture” and articulated in four points: changes in the European universities, tension between faith and knowledge, the presence of the Church in the university and the world of science, Europe as a challenge and an opportunity.
“During the centuries the number of universities has grown and their aspect has changed” Cardinal Lehmann said. The number of students and universities has grown, the terms “profit” and “competition” are used increasingly in the economic sense to the expense of disciplinary range and minor subjects such as theology, the number of students who go abroad to study is minimum. “Although the university horizon has broadened and become more varied, for the Church it remains an important field of work” Cardinal Lehmann said. Theological sciences, Catholic universities and university pastoral are the signs – but not the only ones – of the presence of the Church in the ambit of the university and science, recalling that dialogue is not easy to establish and carry forward.
Cardinal Lehmann underlined that “the university is part of European identity” understood as “opening to science and the knowledge of other regions and religions”; he also recalled that European identity “also has knowledge of its own roots”. The absence of explicit reference to Christianity in the project for a European Constitution, “could have widespread consequences also for the universities “which are not only providers of services for research or agencies to satisfy the formative needs of the economy, they are also places of the spirit and of the search for truth”. SL (Fides Service 18/7/2003 EM lines 45 Words: 628)
