Vatican City (Fides Service) - "Your university expresses the universal character typical of the Catholic Church. Those who study in your college must be open to the values of all the different cultures, bringing them to confront the Gospel message". Pope John Paul II said this on November 29, in the Paul VI Hall in the Vatican where he received participants at a Convention promoted by the Pontifical Urban University to mark the 375th anniversary of the foundation of Urban College. Speaking of the times when the College was founded the Pope underlined that in those days "it was necessary to guarantee freedom of evangelisation in lands recently discovered and in those countries where Christianity had been announced much earlier, such as China. If those times were difficult, we cannot say that in our day things are easy. As particularly those of you who come from regions where war, disease, poverty reap numerous victims every day will know. Therefore more than ever necessary an academic Institution such as yours, able to transmit philosophical, historical and juridical sciences within the cultures of peoples so different one from the other." SL See complete text of Pope's address in Italian (Fides Service 39/11/2002)