Pope Leo XIV has chosen education. In a single week, the pope spoke twice about universities, young people, and knowledge: first in a message to the Bolivian Catholic University “San Pablo” on its sixtieth anniversary, then in a historic visit to the Sapienza in Rome.
Two distinct gestures, two vastly different settings — Bolivia and the heart of Europe — yet shot through with the same urgency: to restore meaning to the act of studying, teaching, and thinking together.
The starting point is a diagnosis that pulls no punches. Leo describes a world in which knowledge risks being reduced to an instrument of domination and in which competitiveness devours the young and anxiety crushes them.
“We are a desire, not an algorithm”: with that single sentence, delivered in the Sapienza’s Aula Magna (Great Hall), the Pope drove a stake into the ground of our era. It is a flat rejection of every form of reductionism, a call not to confuse a person with her data, performance, or numbers.
But Leo does not stop at denunciation. At the Bolivian university, he recalls that, for the Christian, truth is never an abstract concept — it has a face and a relational dimension.
At the Sapienza, he poses an uncomfortable question to the faculty: “Do I trust my students?” Teaching, he says, is a form of charity — exactly as much as rescuing a migrant at sea or reaching a desperate conscience.
Leo’s is a paradigm shift. It is the core of a vision that binds the lectern to the street, the book to the wound. You can hear the inheritance of Francis in his words.
And then there is the most explicitly political passage. Leo XIV denounces the rise in military spending in Europe, challenges the notion that rearmament can be called “defense,” and demands vigilance regarding the use of artificial intelligence in armed conflict.
It is the language of a Pope who does not separate the lecture hall from the public square or knowledge from justice.
Two speeches, a single message: in the world’s disorder, education is not a luxury but a form of resistance. And the university, if it accepts the challenge, can once again become the place where the future is taught before it is endured.
With thanks to Global Catholic and Antonio Spadaro SJ, where this article originally appeared.
