Pope Leo XIV urges university students to “satiate the hunger for truth and meaning”

Pope Leo XIV on Monday urged university students to satisfy their “hunger for truth and meaning,” lamenting that modern education often fails to consider “a broader view.”

“Today we have become experts in infinitesimal details of reality, but we are incapable of achieving an overall vision, a vision that gives unity to things through a greater and deeper meaning,” said Pope Leo XIV. “The Christian experience, on the other hand, wants to teach us to look at life and reality with an integrative perspective.”

The Pope presided over a Mass for students from Rome’s pontifical universities this Monday, October 27, marking both the start of the academic year and the opening day of the World Education Jubilee, a week-long celebration that will run until November 1 as part of the Jubilee of Hope.

The jubilee highlights the global reach of Catholic education with more than 231,000 schools and universities in 171 countries serving nearly 72 million students worldwide, the Vatican reports.

Pope Leo described education as “an authentic act of love.” He said: “Satisfying the hunger for truth and meaning is a necessary task, because without truth or authentic meanings one can fall into a void.”

“What we receive as we seek the truth and commit ourselves to study helps us discover that we are not creatures thrown into the world by chance, but that we belong to someone who loves us and who has a plan of love for our lives,” the Pope added.

A pontifical university is a Catholic university under the authority of the Vatican. In Rome, several of these universities, including the Jesuit-run Gregorian University and the Dominican University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, educate Catholic seminarians, priests, nuns, and lay students from around the world in theology, philosophy, canon law, and other disciplines.

In your homilyPope Leo XIV encouraged students and educators to integrate their intellectual work with their spiritual life.

“Looking at the example of men and women like Augustine, Thomas, Teresa of Avila, Edith Stein and many others (…), we too are called to carry out intellectual work and the search for truth without separating them from life,” he stated.

“It is important to cultivate this unity, so that what happens in university classrooms and in educational environments of all types and levels does not remain an abstract intellectual exercise, but rather becomes a reality capable of transforming life, of making us deepen our relationship with Christ, of making us better understand the mystery of the Church, of making us bold witnesses of the Gospel in society.”

Pope Leo also told university students that the truth found in Christ can free us from self-centeredness.

“When the human being is incapable of seeing beyond himself, his own experience, his own ideas and convictions, his own schemes, then he remains a prisoner, remains a slave, incapable of maturing his own judgment,” he stated.

“But, in reality, many things that matter in life – we could say the fundamental things – are not given to us by ourselves, but come from others; they come to us and we receive them from teachers, from encounters, from life’s experiences. And this is an experience of grace, because it heals our bowing down. (…) This happens especially when we find Christ in our life.”

The Holy Father also highlighted that “whoever studies rises, broadens his horizons and perspectives, to recover a gaze that is not only fixed on the bottom, but is capable of looking upward: towards God, towards others, towards the mystery of life. This is the grace of the student, the researcher, the scholar.”

As part of the Jubilee of the World of Education, Pope Leo XIV will meet with students on Thursday and with educators on Friday. The jubilee will conclude on Saturday, when the Pope declares Saint John Henry Newman a doctor of the Church.

Pope Leo XIV will also appoint Newman as co-patron of Catholic education alongside Saint Thomas Aquinas in a document to be published on October 28, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of Gravissimum Educationis, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on Christian education.

Translated and adapted by the ACI Prensa team. Originally published in CNA