Scholars need humility, Pope tells professors

POPE MEETS YOUNG ACADEMICS
BY CAROL GLATZ
POPE BENEDICT XVI’s meetings with young religious women and young university professors, held in the same complex, had very different tones.
The Sisters and nuns gathered in the sunny courtyard of the Basilica of St Lawrence, while the professors gathered inside the imposing stone basilica.
The young consecrated women were exuberant, singing and chanting. Most of them stood on their plastic chairs when the Pope entered. The young professors talked quietly before the Pope arrived and remained standing on the floor when the Pope entered; they were in a church, after all. The Pope was once a young professor himself, and much of his advice to the scholars was based on personal experience.
Too many universities are training the young for a profession without helping them to learn to seek and to love knowledge and truth and what it means to be created in God’s image, Pope Benedict said.
Catholics teaching in universities are part of a centuries-long chain of men and women committed to teaching the faith and making it credible to human reason, he said.
It’s not enough to be an expert in your subject, the Pope told the professors. The path to the fullness of truth calls for complete commitment: a path of understanding and love, of reason and faith.
Scholars must have humility, he said. “We must not draw students to ourselves, but set them on the path toward the truth; which we seek together.” While the mood was more effervescent in the courtyard with the Sisters and nuns, the Pope’s message was no less challenging.
Pope Benedict told the young religious: “In a world of relativism and mediocrity, we need that radicalism to which your consecration, as a way of belonging to God who is loved above all things, bears witness.” Through their lives and vows religious become a “living exegesis” or explanation of God’s word of love and salvation.
“Your lives must testify to the personal encounter with Christ which has nourished your consecration, and to all the transforming power of that encounter,” he said.
“The Church needs your youthful fidelity, rooted and built up in Christ,” he told them before intoning the Lord’s Prayer in Latin. As the high, light voices of the Sisters filled the courtyard, the Pope sang more and more quietly.