Pope Leo XIV received the outstanding Uruguayan Jesuit priest Julio Fernández Techera, rector of the Catholic University of Uruguay (UCU) since 2016, according to the press office of the press of the Vatican.
The Holy See did not give more details about the meeting, but when consulted by ACI Press, the priest said that “it was a courtesy visit for the 40 years of the University” founded in 1985, now being the first private higher education institution in the country, with headquarters in Montevideo, Punta del Este and Salto.
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In his website The UCU points out: “We are an institution of higher education plural and open to the world, committed to excellence, the construction of a more inclusive and fair society, and the evangelization of our culture; we form open people from the educational tradition of the Church and the Society of Jesus.”
Father Fernández Techera, who is 59 years old and is a doctor in Philosophy and Education Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid, wrote in 2024 a critical essay of the Society of Jesus in which he said that the order founded by San Ignacio de Loyola in 1534 is in “deep decline”.
He also criticized the management of cases of alleged sexual abuse, such as those committed by Marko Rupnik, expelled from the order for disobedience in 2023, and those denounced against the late Alfonso Pedrajas (Father Picas) in Bolivia.
The Rector of the UCU also referred to “the fall of the number of income to the company, which in the West is exacerbated year after year, as well as the high number of abandonment of members of the order” and said that the look of the order with respect to the world seems to be more linked “to some political party of the leftist or a progressive NGO.”
In that same text, Fernández, with more than 25 years as a priestit emphasizes that the Jesuits have “a wonderful and necessary charisma for the Church, a religious, apostolic and priestly charisma. We have to recover it and live it with passion, courage and generosity.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.