On 7 June, the colloquium “Global Education Pact and the University” took place in the auditorium “P. Manuel Arcusa Castellá, Sch. Manuel Arcusa Castellá, Sch.” Auditorium of the Universidad Cristóbal Colón. The meeting, which took place at the initiative of its rector, Fr Francisco Javier Alonso Arroyo, is part of the project promoted by Pope Francis, which aims to establish links between the different institutions of the community in order to educate the new generations.
As an introduction, Fr Javier Alonso himself gave a talk on the importance and scope of the “Global Pact for Education”. As an example, he cited Pope Benedict XVI, who at the time referred to the educational emergency, which he defined as the difficulty of teaching the new generations the fundamental values of existence, the right behaviour and the criteria on which they should build their lives.
With regard to the Global Pact for Education, Father Alonso referred to three documents written by Pope Francis that summarise his position as representative of the Catholic Church on this issue.
“The exhortation Evangelii gaudium calls us to go out of our community and bring the Good News to the peripheries; to go where the Gospel is not; as well as the encyclicals Laudato si, on care for the common home, and Fratelli tutti, on building fraternity. If we read these encyclicals, we will realise that Pope Francis is giving us a whole curriculum of what this new education could look like, and it also largely coincides with what UNESCO is telling us. It is a call to change, to conversion, to leave our comfort zone and to walk new paths, to seek a new relationship with our common home, our earth, and to build a new fraternity”.
He mentioned Pope Francis’ call to families, communities, schools, universities, institutions, religions, leaders, men and women of culture, science, sport, artists, media and all of humanity to make a personal commitment to seven commitments in 2020:
- Putting people at the centre
- Listen to the younger generation
- Support women
- Taking the family to task
- Openness to inclusion
- Renewing the economy and politics
- Caring for the common home
“The Global Pact for Education,” said the Pope:
“is an opportunity to improve our education systems, including the university, and to respond to the challenges, but if we do not come together, we will not achieve anything. Therefore, one of the Pope’s proposals is to build an educational village within a territory: uniting the institutions of a small territory and creating networks between them. The Pope points out that the whole village is needed to educate a child: We are all necessary. So the approach is that the education system, in this case the university, is linked to the family, the labour market, the Church, culture and the authorities, and we can work on joint projects aimed at the same population of children and young people in the same territory”.
M.R. Carlos Briseño Arch, OAR, Bishop of Veracruz, was one of the panellists who began by pointing out the contribution that the University Cristóbal Colón should make to the Global Pact for Education in their respective territories.
Edmundo Gómez Martínez
Directorate for Institutional Communication and Image
