VATICAN - To play a leading role in the cultural debate of today students at Rome’s Pontifical Universities launch a new magazine Synthesis

Rome (Fides Service) - To play a leading role in university activity, participate in the present day cultural debate in order to facilitate the Church’s cultural response in the future, students at Rome’s Pontifical Universities intend to form centres of debate and reflection. The first step in this endeavour was the launching of Synthesis a two monthly periodical, printed and circulated in 5,000 copies, which aims to help students, teachers and college authorities to make Pontifical Universities what they should be: forges of Catholic thought able to influence the present day cultural reality.
Motivations which led members of different faculties and academic cycles to converge on the idea of a periodical were consolidated during regular meetings to discuss philosophical, theological, psychological themes and others...attended also by teachers and specialists in various different areas of research. The motivations revolve around three main points: the role and recognised influence of pontifical universities in every era in contemporary cultural debate; the conviction that in the debate students have had and can still have a fundamental task; the conviction, lastly, that the active role of students, for reasons to be identified and analysed, is lacking today with the consequent diffusion of a ‘pupil’ mentality. A mentality which is taking shape in a concerning way, a form of ‘student’s mind’ which accepts determined knowledge from the docent without however helping the arising of dynamics capable of stimulating critical reflection and having repercussions in the intra and extra academic cultural debate.
The first issue of Synthesis is essentially a presentation which offers, among other things, a debate on Europe, on challenges facing Christians in the West today and on those facing the intellectual Christian world, with an interview with philosopher Armando Rigobello. It also presents a testimonial from a former student on the conditions at pontifical Colleges and relative possibilities to be developed. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 20/10/2005 - Righe 24; Parole 330)