Pope Francis opposes idea to ‘dissolve’ 400-year-old missionary university in Rome

Vatican City, Aug 30, 2024 / 09:08 am

Pope Francis expressed disagreement on Friday with a proposal to absorb a 400-year-old missionary-focused university in Rome into other pontifical universities.

Members of the Dicastery for Evangelization are 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 agency 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 educational 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 without a strong Christian presence or where the Church has few financial resources.

Earlier this year, the Vatican’s publishing house signed an agreement with the pontifical university’s press to help with the editorial production of some of its publications.

The Libreria Editrice Vaticana will assist the Urbaniana University Press with “the editorial management of the scientific production” of the university’s historic publishing service, according to a July 18 press release.

The change is part of an overall restructuring to increase operational cooperation between the Urban University and other pontifical universities in Rome.

The reconfiguration comes with a reduction in teaching staff. For the 2024-2025 academic year, the university will have 47 full and 40 adjunct and visiting professors, reduced from 62 full and 113 adjunct and visiting professors during the prior academic year.  

Financially supported by the Dicastery for Evangelization, the university is also aiming to reduce costs by a projected 1.5 million euros ($1.66 million) in 2025.

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.