Pope chats with students of Jesuit schools

07 June, 2013 - The aim of a Jesuit school is to help young people develop a large heart to be able to freely choose what is good and commit themselves in the service of God and others. This is how Pope Francis outlined Jesuit education on Friday when he received in the Vatican some 8000 students and teachers of schools run by Jesuits in Italy and Albania. The Argentine Pope, who is also a Jesuit, said that the school was one of the educative environments where one learns to become adult and mature men and women capable of walking the path of life. Gathering from what St. Ignatius, the Jesuit founder teaches us, he said, the principal element in a school is to learn to be magnanimous, the capacity to have a great heart open to God and to others.
Finding the reading of his prepared speech annoying, Pope Francis made a brief summary of it and quickly engaged in a lively question and answer exchange with the students, highlighting issues, such as crisis of values, poverty, human dignity, politics, economic crisis, social injustice etc. He frankly replied to some students who asked him personal questions. When asked why he had refused to move into the sumptuous Apostolic Palace, choosing to live instead in the simple Casa Santa Marta residence, he replied, "It's not just a question of riches but also a personality issue.” “I need to live among people and if I lived on my own, perhaps a little isolated, it wouldn't do me good," he said, adding that he had made the decision for "psychiatric reasons". When one girl, Teresa, asked him if he had wanted to become Pope, he clearly said he didn’t want. As a philosophy student, he has requested former Jesuit Superior General, Fr. Pedro Aruppe, to send him as a missionary to Japan. But Fr. Aruppe advised him that with one lung it would be difficult. Answering to two students the Pope also said that the decision to become a priest had been difficult for him and that he had suffered ``moments of interior darkness'' when ``you feel dry, without interior joy.'' But he said he went ahead because he loved Christ.
In his prepared text which he handed to the group, the Pope noted that a Jesuit school “not only helps you develop your intelligence, but also helps an integral formation of all components of your personality,” the Pope said. The Holy Father particularly picked two fundamental values: freedom and service. Freedom, he said, is to be able to differentiate between good and bad and choose the good. This, he said, is not easy and requires courage to go against the current, but it gives one the backbone. Service, the Pope continued, helps one to open up to others, especially the poor and needy and work for a better world. But to be magnanimous with interior freedom and the spirit of service, the Pope said, spiritual formation is needed. Recalling the day’s feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Pope thus urged the students to love Jesus, through prayer, dialogue and reading the Bible. Addressing Jesuits, teachers, co-operators and parents, the Pope urged them to be coherent witnesses, teaching students to see the beauty and goodness of creation and man, who always bears the imprint of God. Setting aside his prepared text, the Pope engaged in a lively exchange with the students, highlighting several burning issues of society today, and urged them to face them courageously and find solutions.