Acta Apostolicae Sedis - Commentarium Officiale706

ing the nature and legitimate autonomy of the other, yet working together

harmoniously and creatively to serve the fulfilment of the human person in

truth and love.

A third issue needing to be investigated concerns the nature of the con-

tribution which Christianity can make to the humanism of the future. The

question of man, and thus of modernity, challenges the Church to devise

effective ways of proclaiming to contemporary culture the "realism" of her

faith in the saving work of Christ. Christianity must not be relegated to the

world of myth and emotion, but respected for its claim to shed light on the

truth about man, to be able to transform men and women spiritually, and

thus to enable them to carry out their vocation in history. In my recent visit

to Brazil, I voiced my conviction that "unless we do know God in and with

Christ, all of reality becomes an indecipherable enigma".2 Knowledge can

never be limited to the purely intellectual realm; it also includes a renewed

ability to look at things in a way free of prejudices and preconceptions, and

to allow ourselves to be "amazed" by reality, whose truth can be discovered

by uniting understanding with love. Only the God who has a human face,

revealed in Jesus Christ, can prevent us from truncating reality at the very

moment when it demands ever new and more complex levels of understand-

ing. The Church is conscious of her responsibility to offer this contribution to

contemporary culture.

In Europe, as elsewhere, society urgently needs the service to wisdom

which the university community provides. This service extends also to the

practical aspects of directing research and activity to the promotion of hu-

man dignity and to the daunting task of building the civilization of love.

University professors, in particular, are called to embody the virtue of intel-

lectual charity, recovering their primordial vocation to train future genera-

tions not only by imparting knowledge but by the prophetic witness of their

own lives. The university, for its part, must never lose sight of its particular

calling to be an "universitas" in which the various disciplines, each in its own

way, are seen as part of a greater unum. How urgent is the need to rediscover

the unity of knowledge and to counter the tendency to fragmentation and

lack of communicability that is all too often the case in our schools! The

effort to reconcile the drive to specialization with the need to preserve the

unity of knowledge can encourage the growth of European unity and help the

continent to rediscover its specific cultural "vocation" in today's world. Only

a Europe conscious of its own cultural identity can make a specific contri-

2 Address to Bishops of CELAM, 3.