Pope Leo XIV inaugurated the Academic Year of the Pontifical Lateran University this Friday with a wide-ranging speech in which he reaffirmed the unique mission of this university center, historically linked to the Successor of Peter. Before academic authorities, professors, and students, the pontiff emphasized the institution’s responsibility in the theological, philosophical, and juridical formation of the Church, as well as in interdisciplinary research that responds to the cultural, scientific, and pastoral challenges of the contemporary world.
Leo XIV insisted on the need for formation rooted in truth, open to dialogue, and oriented toward the common good, encouraging the Lateran University to maintain its universal vocation and its direct service to the Magisterium.
We leave below the speech that the Pope addresses to those present:
Dear brothers and sisters:
I greet the Grand Chancellor, Cardinal Reina – to whom I express my thanks for his words –, the Rector Magnificent, His Excellency Monsignor Amarante, the members of the Superior Coordination Council, the faculty, the students, the auxiliary staff, and the civil and religious Authorities present.
I am pleased to be here among you, at the Pontifical Lateran University, for the inauguration of the 253rd academic year since its foundation. This is a special occasion in which, while we look with gratitude at the long history that precedes us, we are also oriented toward the mission that awaits us, toward the paths to explore, toward the service to offer to the Church in today’s reality and in the face of future challenges. A grateful look at the past, therefore, but also eyes and heart directed toward the future, because the valuable service that the university provides is necessary.
Every university is, in fact, a place of study, research, formation, relationships, and ties with the reality in which it is inserted. In particular, ecclesiastical and pontifical universities, erected or approved by the Apostolic See, are communities in which the «necessary cultural mediation of the faith is elaborated, articulating itself in a reflection open to dialogue with other knowledges, finding its primary and perennial source in Jesus Christ.»[1]
Among academic institutions, the Lateran University has a wholly special bond with the Successor of Peter, and this is a constitutive feature of its identity and mission from its origins, when in 1773 Clement XIV entrusted the theology school of the Roman College to the secular clergy, asking that said institution depend on the Pope to form his presbyters. From that moment, all successive Pontiffs have maintained and strengthened a privileged relationship with what would become the current Lateran University. Among them, the Blessed Pius IX, who gave the still current structure of the four Faculties: Theology, Philosophy, Canon Law, and Civil Law, with the power to confer academic degrees in Utroque Iure; Leo XIII, who founded the Institute of Higher Literature; Pius XII, who erected in the Athenaeum the Pontifical Pastoral Institute; St. John XXIII, who granted the Athenaeum the title of University; and St. Paul VI, who, having been a professor in these classrooms, upon visiting the University newly elected, reaffirmed the close bond between it and the Roman Curia.
This peculiar bond was underlined by St. John Paul II: «You constitute – he said – in a special way, the University of the Pope: an undoubtedly honorable title, but onerous for that very reason.» With equally affectionate words, said bond was reiterated by Pope Benedict and by Pope Francis; the latter wished to institute two Study Cycles: in Peace Sciences and in Ecology and Environment.
In reiterating and confirming everything established and granted by my venerated Predecessors, I wish to point out the peculiar mission of the Pontifical Lateran University in the current circumstances.
This University, unlike other illustrious academic institutions, also Roman ones, does not have a founding charism to safeguard, deepen, and develop, but rather its peculiar orientation is the magisterium of the Pontiff. By its nature and mission, therefore, it constitutes a privileged center in which the teaching of the universal Church is elaborated, received, developed, and contextualized. From this point of view, it is an institution to which the work of the Roman Curia can also refer for its daily labor.
At the same time, academic reflection, inspired by the Petrine charism, opens to interdisciplinary, international, and intercultural perspectives. This mission finds diversified application in the four Faculties and the two Institutes present in this headquarters, as well as in the three Institutes ad instar facultatis with external headquarters: the Pontifical Augustinian Patristic Institute, of the Augustinians; the Pontifical Alphonsian Academy for studies in Moral Theology, of the Redemptorists; the Pontifical Claretian Institute of Theology of Consecrated Life, of the Claretians.
To these must be added the 28 Institutes of various titles associated on three continents – Europe, Asia, and America – both to the Faculty of Theology and to the Institutum Utriusque Iuris: a broad and differentiated reality, expression of the richness of cultures and experiences and, at the same time, of the search for unity and fidelity to Petrine teaching.
Dear friends, today we have an urgent need to think about the faith in order to express it in the cultural scenarios and current challenges, but also to counter the risk of the cultural void that, in our time, becomes increasingly invasive. In particular, the Faculty of Theology is called to reflect on the deposit of faith and to bring out its beauty and credibility in the various contemporary contexts, so that it appears as a fully human proposal, capable of transforming the lives of people and society, of arousing prophetic changes in the face of the dramas and poverties of our time, and of fostering the search for God. This mission requires that the Christian faith be communicated and transmitted in the different spheres of life and ecclesial action, and for this reason I consider the service performed by the Pastoral Institute to be of vital importance.
At the Lateran University, the study of philosophy (cf. Veritatis gaudium, art. 81, § 1) must be oriented toward the search for truth through the resources of human reason, open to dialogue with cultures and, above all, with Christian Revelation, for the integral development of the human person in all its dimensions. This is an important commitment, also in the face of a sometimes renunciant attitude that marks contemporary thought, as well as before the emerging forms of rationality linked to transhumanism and posthumanism.
The juridical Faculties, of Canon Law and Civil Law, which distinguish our University for centuries, are called to study and teach Law through the broadest valorization of the comparison between the legal systems of civil orders and that of the Catholic Church. In particular, I encourage them to consider and study in depth the administrative processes, an urgent challenge for the Church.
Finally, the study cycles of Peace Sciences and Ecology and Environment deserve a special word, which over the years will acquire a more defined institutional configuration. The themes they address are an essential part of the recent Magisterium of the Church, which, established as a sign of the covenant between God and humanity, is called to form operators of peace and justice who build and witness the Kingdom of God. Peace is certainly a gift from God, but it requires at the same time women and men capable of building it every day and of supporting, at the national and international level, processes toward an integral ecology. I therefore ask my University to continue developing and enhancing in an inter and transdisciplinary way these two study cycles and, if necessary, to integrate them with other itineraries.
All this concerns the educational mission of the University in general, but I would also like to imagine with you the Lateran University as a space that – as I said at the beginning – has eyes and heart oriented toward the future, and launches itself into contemporary challenges through some peculiar dimensions that I briefly highlight.
The first is this: at the center of formation must be reciprocity and fraternity. Today, unfortunately, the word «person» is often used as a synonym for individual, and the attractiveness of individualism as the key to a successful life has unsettling consequences in all areas: one aims at self-promotion, the primacy of the self is fed, and cooperation is difficult; prejudices and walls toward others grow, especially toward those who are different; the service of responsibility is confused with solitary leadership, and in the end, misunderstandings and conflicts multiply. Academic formation helps us to come out of self-referentiality and promotes a culture of reciprocity, of otherness, of dialogue. Against what the Encyclical Fratelli tutti defines as «the virus of radical individualism» (n. 105), I ask you to cultivate reciprocity through relationships marked by gratuity and experiences that foster fraternity and encounter between different cultures. The Pontifical Lateran University, enriched by the presence of students, faculty, and staff from the five continents, represents a microcosm of the universal Church: be, therefore, a prophetic sign of communion and fraternity.
The second dimension I wish to recall is scientificity, which must be promoted, defended, and developed. Academic service often does not enjoy due appreciation, also due to deep-rooted prejudices that unfortunately float even in the ecclesial community. Sometimes the idea is observed that research and study do not serve real life, that what counts in the Church is pastoral practice more than theological, biblical, or juridical preparation. The risk is to slip into the temptation to simplify complex issues to avoid the effort of thought, with the danger that, even in pastoral action and its languages, one falls into banality, approximation, or rigidity.
Scientific research and the effort of seeking are necessary. We need laypeople and priests who are prepared and competent. For this reason, I exhort you not to lower your guard regarding scientificity, carrying forward a passionate search for truth and a rigorous dialogue with other sciences, with reality, with the problems and sufferings of society.
This requires that the University have prepared faculty, placed in conditions – pastoral, juridical, and economic – that allow them to dedicate themselves to academic life and research; that students be motivated and enthusiastic, willing to rigorous study. It requires that the University dialogue with other centers of study and teaching, so that in this inter and transdisciplinary perspective unexplored paths can be undertaken.
The third dimension that I recall synthetically is that of the common good. The end of the educational and academic process must be to form people who, in the logic of gratuity and in the passion for truth and justice, can be builders of a new world, supportive and fraternal. The University can and must spread this culture, becoming a sign and expression of this new world and of the search for the common good.
Dearest ones, an illustrious theologian of this Athenaeum, Professor Marcello Bordoni, in one of his reflections on the relationship between Christology and inculturation, states that it is necessary to assume the commitment to think about the faith and that «dialogue with the world, with its changing history that often tests the Christian’s faith before new problems and new life situations, constitutes the gymnasium of this commitment which is the ‘fatigue of the concept'» (M. Bordoni, Theological Reflection on the Truth of Christian Revelation, in Path 2002/2, 263).
I wish you to continue probing the mystery of the Christian faith with this passion and to always exercise yourselves in the gymnasium of dialogue with the world, with society, with the questions and challenges of today. The Lateran University occupies a special place in the heart of the Pope, and the Pope encourages you to dream big, to imagine possible spaces for the Christianity of the future, to work with joy so that all may discover Christ and, in Him, find the fullness to which they aspire.
Thank you! And have a good academic year!