Acta Benedicti Pp. XVI 869

VI

Apud Castrum Pragense cum mundo academico Summus Pontifex se congregat.*

Dear Cardinals,

Your Excellencies,

Our meeting this evening gives me a welcome opportunity to express my

esteem for the indispensable role in society of universities and institutions of

higher learning. I thank the student who has kindly greeted me in your name,

the members of the university choir for their fine performance, and the distin-

guished Rector of Charles University, Professor Václav Hampl, for his thought-

ful presentation. The service of academia, upholding and contributing to the

cultural and spiritual values of society, enriches the nation's intellectual patri-

mony and strengthens the foundations of its future development. The great

changes which swept Czech society twenty years ago were precipitated not least

by movements of reform which originated in university and student circles.

That quest for freedom has continued to guide the work of scholars whose

diakonia of truth is indispensable to any nation's well-being.

I address you as one who has been a professor, solicitous of the right to

academic freedom and the responsibility for the authentic use of reason, and is

now the Pope who, in his role as Shepherd, is recognized as a voice for the

ethical reasoning of humanity. While some argue that the questions raised by

religion, faith and ethics have no place within the purview of collective reason,

that view is by no means axiomatic. The freedom that underlies the exercise of

reason - be it in a university or in the Church - has a purpose: it is directed to

the pursuit of truth, and as such gives expression to a tenet of Christianity

which in fact gave rise to the university. Indeed, man's thirst for knowledge

prompts every generation to broaden the concept of reason and to drink at the

wellsprings of faith. It was precisely the rich heritage of classical wisdom,

assimilated and placed at the service of the Gospel, which the first Christian

missionaries brought to these lands and established as the basis of a spiritual

and cultural unity which endures to this day. The same spirit led my prede-

cessor Pope Clement VI to establish the famed Charles University in 1347,

which continues to make an important contribution to wider European aca-

demic, religious and cultural circles.

* Die 27 Septembris 2009.