This morning, in the room next to the Paul VI Audience Hall, Leo XIV received a Delegation of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (USA), gathered in Rome for the 2026 Seminar.
What is the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities?
The Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities - the ACCU, as it is known across the Atlantic - is the collective voice of Catholic higher education in the United States. It was founded in 1899, when fifty-three delegates from as many Catholic colleges met in Chicago to give the Church’s academic institutions on American soil an organised form and a common voice. The initiative had begun the previous year with a letter from Thomas Conaty, then rector of the Catholic University of America. From that first nucleus, the association has grown to include more than two hundred institutions today and represents over ninety per cent of accredited Catholic colleges and universities in the United States, along with around twenty international universities.
It is based in Washington, belongs to the International Federation of Catholic Universities (IFCU), and maintains stable relations with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and with the Holy See’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. Within the association, the right to vote belongs to the president or rector of each member institution. This is why the delegation received in audience was composed - as the Pope himself acknowledged in addressing them - of those at the head of these institutions. It was therefore not an assembly of lecturers, but the governing leadership of American Catholic higher education itself, gathered in Rome for its annual Seminar.
The words of Leo XIV
The address took its cue from Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV’s first Encyclical Letter, signed on 15 May on the 135th anniversary of Rerum novarum and published on 25 May, dedicated to safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. It was from that text that the Pontiff drew in order to indicate the first of the challenges facing the world of education today: the increasing fragmentation of knowledge. There is now an abundance of specialists, he observed, yet many of them “struggle to find direction in their lives”, unable to connect information with deeper knowledge or to maintain a sense of purpose. What is lacking, in other words, is that unified vision of reality capable of holding together not only the different fields of knowledge, but also the many aspects of existence and the deepest longings of the heart.
Here Leo XIV placed the proper task of Catholic education. Young people, he recalled, often come to universities motivated by employment prospects. It falls to those who receive them to carry out the “noble task” of guiding that desire for knowledge so that they may learn “to seek and love the truth, to reflect on the meaning of life and to recognise the dignity of every person”. This is far from easy, since the search for truth requires learning, guidance and great effort. The Pope explained that unless Catholic education instils a true passion for truth - not only intellectual truth, but the Truth who is Christ himself - it will be vain to expect anyone to make the effort required to recognise it and conform their life to it. Catholic institutions are therefore called to be, in the words of the Apostolic Letter Drawing New Maps of Hope, a “living environment in which the Christian vision permeates every discipline and every interaction”.
From the spiritual level, the Pontiff moved to the pedagogical level, and once again the theme of the encyclical returned. Technological advances, and in particular the spread of artificial intelligence, now make it increasingly difficult to evaluate students’ work and require educators to adapt their methods creatively, even at the cost of greater effort. Hence the invitation to invest generously in the formation of new generations and to ensure that young people learn to engage positively with new technologies without renouncing the development of the capacities received from God: to reason, to think critically, and to commit knowledge to memory, so that they may prepare themselves to shape responsibly the world that is to come.
In taking leave of the delegation, Leo XIV expressed the hope that students may always find in their institutions the “sound doctrine” entrusted to the Church, the true and lasting foundation not only for their personal lives but also for the very future of the Nation.
fr.F.V.
Silere non possum