Here are some highlights of Pope Francis’ message to a delegation of the International Federation of Catholic Universities:

Indeed, the Catholic university, being “one of the best instruments that the Church offers to our age” (ibid., 10), cannot fail to be an expression of the love that inspires every activity of the Church, namely, God’s love for the human person.

At a time when, unfortunately, education itself is becoming a “business”, and great impersonal economic systems are investing in schools and universities as they do in the stock market, the Church’s institutions must show that they are of a different nature and act in accordance with a different mindset. An educational enterprise is not only based on perfect programmes, efficient equipment or good business practices. A greater passion must animate the university, as evidenced in a shared search for truth, a greater horizon of meaning, lived out in a community of knowledge where the liberality of love is palpable.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, who studied the concept of love in the writings of Saint Augustine, pointed out that the great teacher described love with the word appetitus, understood as inclination, desire, striving. My advice to you, then, is this: Don’t lose your appetitus! Preserve the intensity of your first love! Don’t let Catholic universities replace desire with functionalism or bureaucracy. It is not enough to award academic degrees: it is necessary to awaken and cherish in each person the desire to “be”. It is not enough to prepare students for competitive careers: it is necessary to help them discover fruitful vocations, to inspire pathways of authentic existence and to integrate the contribution of each individual within the creative dynamics of the larger community. Certainly, we need to reflect on artificial intelligence, but also on spiritual intelligence, without which persons remain strangers to themselves. The university is too important a resource to live only “in step with the times”, setting aside the responsibility called for by the deeper human needs and the dreams and aspirations of the young….

We cannot allow fear to guide the management of our universities; unfortunately, this happens more often than we think. The temptation to hide behind walls, in a safe social bubble, avoiding risks or cultural challenges, turning our backs on the complexity of reality may seem the safest course. But this is sheer illusion. Fear devours the soul. Never encircle the university with walls of fear. Don’t let a Catholic university merely replicate the walls typical of the societies in which we live: those of inequality, dehumanization, intolerance and indifference, or models aimed at promoting individualism rather than investing in fraternity….

Help us to translate culturally, in a language open to new generations and new times, the richness of the Christian tradition; to identify the new frontiers of thought, science and technology and to approach them with balance and wisdom. Help us to build intergenerational and intercultural covenants for the protection and care of our common home, within a vision of integral ecology, and in this way respond effectively to the cry of the earth and the plea of the poor.