Pope Francis expressed disagreement with a proposal to absorb a 400-year-old missionary-focused university in Rome into other pontifical universities. Members of the Dicastery for Evangelization were meeting in an extraordinary plenary assembly Aug. 29–30 to discuss the future of the Pontifical Urban University, which educates priests and religious from the Catholic Church’s mission territories. “There is some plan to ‘dissolve’ [the university] with the other universities: No, this will not do,” Francis said in his address Aug. 30 to the cardinals, bishops, priests, and religious gathered for the plenary.
According to Agenzia Fides, a missionary-focused news age-ncy under the Dicastery for Evangelization, the Rome assembly is an intermediate step in discussions about “the present and future” of the Pontifical Urban University. Also known as the “Urbaniana,” the missionary university was founded as the Urban College in 1627 by Pope Urban VIII, part of the educa-tional aspect of the then-Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide. In 1962, it was elevated to a pontifical university. Its mission is to train and educate the priests, religious, and laypeople who help spread the Gospel in places with-out a strong Christian presence or where the Church has few financial resources.
In his speech on Friday, Pope Francis thanked the dicastery’s members for traveling to Rome “to reflect on the identity, mission, expectations, and future of the Pontifical Urbaniana University.” “I, too, would like to offer some thoughts on this,” he added, underlining that the Urbaniana “has its own identity.”
The pope reflected on the still-relevant missionary vocation of the Urban University and the need to balance that identity with the issues faced by the Church and world today.
He also said the need to raise the quality of educational and research offerings must be balanced with a necessary rationing of human and economic resources. ”Making good use of resources,” Francis said, “means unifying equal paths, sharing faculty from the six [pontifical] institutions, eliminating waste, planning activities wisely, and abandoning outdated practices and projects.” “In the specific case of the Urbaniana, it is important that, in the quality of the educational offerings, its missionary and intercultural specificity emerges even more, so that those who are being trained are able to mediate with originality the Christian message in the relationship with other cultures and religions,” he said.