In a act presided over by the Archbishop of Madrid and Grand Chancellor of the San Dámaso Ecclesiastical UniversityCardinal José Cobo, and presented by the Rector of the corporation, Nicolás Álvarez de las Asturias, the Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça praised friendship as a necessary asset for the academic community.
On the celebration of the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Cardinal Prefect of Culture and Education at the Holy See, pointed out that "the University would fulfill its mission well if one day it were remembered by those who were formed there, not only for the quality of teaching and research that they found, but also for the beautiful friendships that began there".
However, the reflection of the Portuguese cardinal, a poet as well as a theologian, went further, and constituted a diagnosis of today's society, with regard to the words love and friendship, under the title 'In Praise of Friendship: Rediscovering a Necessary Good'.
Centrality of reflection on friendship
"I hope you will not find it strange that I have chosen friendship as my academic argument, when there would seem to be a thousand more urgent and pertinent issues to propose to a university community in this historical and cultural period of accelerated change," he began.
"In St. Thomas the centrality of reflection on friendship is evident, to the point of asking whether perfect beatitude in glory does not also require the company of friends. But the very history of the University would not be understood without the idea of societas amicorum".
"Massive use of the vocabulary of love": consequences.
The Cardinal went on to note that "it seems that our era only knows how to speak of love. As we witness the inflation of this word, its expressive force is clearly diminishing and it seems to have been hijacked by a monotonous and equivocal use. We know less and less what we are talking about when we speak of love. But this does not constitute a brake".
With the same word, he added, "we designate conjugal love and attachment to a sports team, relationships between relatives and those of consumption, the deepest individual aspirations, but also the most frivolous. Everything is love. It is not by chance that the magnificent poetry of W.H. Auden, which the last century chose as one of its songs, is summed up in the question: 'The truth, please, about love'".
In his opinion, as he explained to a large audience at San Damaso, "the danger presented by the massive use of the vocabulary of love is that of losing ourselves in the indefinite, drowning in the limitlessness of subjectivity: we do not really know what love is; it is always everything; it is a task without limits; and this inextricable totality, all too often, is consumed in a disillusioned rhetoric. Friendship is a more objective, more concretely designed form that is perhaps more possible to experience."
The same is true in the "religious universe".
"In the religious universe, unfortunately, the situation is not much different," Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonça continued. "The term love suffers from an excessive use that does not always favor realism and the deepening of the paths of faith. The reference to love is dissipated in homilies, catechetical discourses, moral propositions: a path so varied that its meaning is diluted."
"We have become accustomed to hearing the call to love, receiving it or reproducing it without much knowledge. I am convinced that an important part of the problem lies in the absence of reflection on friendship."
"Friendship, a path of humanization and hope".
His argument continued in the same vein, skeptical of the indiscriminate use of the word love, and praising friendship. "We ambiguously call 'love' certain affective relationships and practices that would gain greater consistency if we thought of them as modes of friendship. Friendship is a universal experience and represents, for each person, an inexhaustible path of humanization and hope."
Later, he quoted Raïssa Maritain, wife of Jacques Maritainwho composed a kind of autobiography recounting the personal experiences of his friends. "And it is true: friends are our best autobiography. But not only that: they expand it, they conspire to make it luminous and authentic (...). Friends bear witness to our heart that there is always a way".
"Friendship is nurtured by the acceptance of limits."
"Friendship does not contain that pretension of possession that, many times, is characteristic of an exaggeratedly narcissistic love. Friendship is nourished by the acceptance of limits," added the cardinal. "Perhaps the great difference between love and friendship lies in the fact that love always tends toward the unlimited, while in friendship we face limitations lightly, we accept that there is a life without us and beyond us."
The Vatican Prefect for Culture and Education mentioned in his lecture Pope Francis. "It is of vital wisdom to embrace boundaries as multiple aspects and links of the same truth, according to what Pope Francis first enunciated in Evangelii gaudium and has often reiterated in his pontificate: 'The model is not the sphere, where every point is equidistant from the center and there are no differences between one point and another. The model is the polyhedron, which reflects the confluence of all the partialities that in it maintain their originality' (EG n. 236)".
Universities, activate as "laboratories of hope".
In conclusion, he cited the recent note on Artificial Intelligence that his Dicastery has prepared together with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which reminds us that "human intelligence is not an isolated faculty, but is exercised in relationships, finding its full expression in dialogue, collaboration and solidarity. We learn with others, we learn thanks to others" (n. 18).
The document exhorted Catholic and ecclesiastical universities to become active "as great laboratories of hope at this crossroads of history." "I believe that we will achieve this best if we do it together, as masters of the friendship that constitutes a concrete expression of hope," he concluded.
