Pope Leo XIV urged university students on Monday to feed their “hunger for truth and meaning,” lamenting that modern education often loses sight of the “big picture.”
“Today we have become experts in the smallest details of reality, but we have lost the capacity of seeing the big picture again, a vision that holds things together through a greater and deeper meaning,” Pope Leo XIV said. “Christian experience, on the other hand, wants to teach us to look at life and reality with a unified gaze.”
The pope presided over a Mass for students from Rome’s pontifical universities on Oct. 27, marking both the start of the academic year and the opening day of the Jubilee of the World of Education, a weeklong celebration that runs through Nov. 1 as part of the Jubilee of Hope.
The jubilee highlights the global reach of Catholic education with more than 231,000 schools and universities in 171 countries serving nearly 72 million students worldwide, according to the Vatican.
Pope Leo described education as “a true act of charity.” He said: “Feeding the hunger for truth and meaning is a necessary task because without truth and authentic meaning one can fall into emptiness.”
“What we receive as we seek the truth and engage in study, therefore, helps us discover that we are not creatures thrown into the world by chance but that we belong to someone who loves us and has a plan of love for our lives,” the pope added.
A pontifical university is a Catholic university under the authority of the Vatican. In Rome, several such universities, including the Jesuit-run Gregorian University and the Dominican University of St. Thomas Aquinas, educate seminarians, priests, religious sisters, and Catholic lay students from around the world in theology, philosophy, canon law, and other disciplines.
In his homily, Pope Leo XIV encouraged students and educators to integrate their intellectual work with their spiritual lives.
“Looking at the example of men and women such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Ávila, Edith Stein, and many others … we too are called to carry on intellectual work and the search for truth without separating them from life,” he said.
“It is important to cultivate this unity so that what happens in university classrooms … becomes a reality capable of transforming life and helps us to deepen our relationship with Christ, to understand better the mystery of the Church, and makes us bold witnesses of the Gospel in society.”
Pope Leo also told the university students that the truth found in Christ can free us from self-absorption.
“When human beings are incapable of seeing beyond themselves, beyond their own experiences, ideas, and convictions, beyond their own projects, then they remain imprisoned, enslaved, and incapable of forming mature judgments,” he said.
“Yet, in reality, many of the things that truly matter in life — we might say, the most fundamental things — do not come from ourselves; we receive them from others. They come to us through our teachers, encounters, and life experiences. This is an experience of grace, for it heals us from self-absorption … This especially happens when we encounter Christ in our lives.”
“Those who study are ‘lifted up,’ broadening their horizons and perspectives in order to recover a vision that does not look downward but is capable of looking upward: toward God, others, and the mystery of life.” Pope Leo XIV said. “This is the grace of the student, the researcher, the scholar.”
As part of the Jubilee of the World of Education, Pope Leo XIV will meet with students on Thursday and with educators on Friday. The jubilee will conclude on Saturday, when the pope will declare St. John Henry Newman a doctor of the Church.
Pope Leo XIV will also designate Newman as a co-patron saint of Catholic education alongside St. Thomas Aquinas in a document to be published Oct. 28, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of Gravissimum Educationis, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on Christian education.
This article was originally published on Catholic News Agency.
