Ignatian Jubilee Year, opportunity for the Gregorian University

I hereby wish to foster a special reflection linked to the particular nature of our Institution and the related importance of the Ignatian Year. In fact, discerning the Gregorian University’s own specific bearing on this event requires in-depth understanding of the true meaning of “conversion.” While the Italian locution is evocative of an orientation in terms of spatiality (for us Christians, a continual or renewed gaze fixed on Christ), the Greek term metànoia evokes a transformative change of the nous, of the mind. And thus, the proprium of this Jubilee Year for our University lies therein. 

The aforementioned renewal process entails for our University the ability to examine itself and its outlook. The opportunities to do so are there to be seized. Embracing synodality and reconciliation in the Church today will not be a human endeavour as such, but a work of God. Indeed, conversion is primarily a gift. All we are required to do is to be open to it, resolutely embrace it, and undertake the journey together syn odòs. I hope and pray that Ignatian spirituality, along with its rediscovery of spiritual conversation as an element of community discernment, may offer a meaningful contribution to our present times and to our world.  But this involves us very closely. 

For example, it comes as no surprise that the Preparatory Commission tasked with developing plans for the integration of the Pontifical Oriental Institute and the Pontifical Biblical Institute into the Pontifical Gregorian University is laying special emphasis on a prospective institutional commitment that fosters various forms of cooperation in a broad perspective. Interdisciplinarity, inter-culturality, inter-nationality and even inter-confessionality. Here lies a major opportunity and challenge to forging a university in fidelity to the spirit of Veritatis Gaudium. Here is where new paradigms of thought are waiting to be assimilated. 

We are thus invited to have faith and hope and, as a Pontifical University with a distinguished Faculty of Theology, we are called upon to work towards this end, firmly supporting the cooperation with its numerous other Faculties, Institutes and Centres in particular. The importance of the 500th anniversary of Ignatius’ first conversion for our University –thereby initiating the process that was to be pursued in Manresa and Venice - is therefore twofold, namely to gain a deeper intellectual understanding of what conversion is, individually and collectively, and of what synodality and cooperation can mean for us. Moreover, it should not be confined to intellectual comprehension or to the transmission of doctrinal theology – albeit direly needed. All of us members of the academic community are invited to be part of this conversion movement. May the Lord bless us and encourage us to this end.