Pope Benedict has been talking lately about education. The subject seems to grab his concern. He is sensing an imminent danger lurking in that strategic field.

Of course, there was that unfortunate event when some university students and staff refused to receive him in their school in Rome. A clear case of misunderstanding, it could have been easily averted if cooler heads prevailed.

As it turned out, the bone of contention brought up by the protesting students did not really have any basis. In fact, the Pope was more on their side. It looked like they were attacking phantoms, not real issues.

Then, there also was a meeting with members of the Catholic Education Congregation, charged with the formation of seminarians. This meeting, in itself, was very interesting.

He said that these Catholic centers of learning should not be afraid to assert their Catholic identity, since that identity blends fidelity to the faith and universal openness to things together.

The problem these days is a certain attitude toward education that tends to put fidelity and openness in conflict. And in most cases, favor is tilted more toward openness than toward fidelity. Some warped ideologies are behind that disturbing situation.

In this regard, he encouraged priests and seminarians to learn to handle the multi-faceted challenges of our times, knowing how to put God in them and to relate everything to God. This is actually a never-ending process.

We should not be afraid to admit that an education that has no reference to God is no education at all. That would be at best a limited education, rootless and ultimately aimless, confining itself to empirical data and refusing to enter a transcendent reality.

Pertinent to this point, he once said: "The highest truths cannot be forced into the type of empirical evidence that only applies to material reality."

Plus, he recently issued a letter to Romans on education as his "own contribution to the formation of new generations, a difficult but crucial commitment for the future."

He said that with factors like spreading violence, fundamentalism, secularism, crisis in marriage and the family, and in education itself, etc., today's generation is rendered fragile.

We don't have to look far to find a smoking-gun kind of evidence to support this claim. We see all around us signs of people, usually young, who seem lost, confused or otherwise swallowed by a wave of escapist activities.

Then he zeroes in on the main culprit: "What is in question is a growing atmosphere...that leads to doubting the value of the human person, the significance of truth and of the good…

"It becomes difficult, then, to hand on from one generation to the next, something valid and certain rules of conduct, credible objectives around which to build one's life."

Now that the Pope has clearly spelled out the problem, we have to set in motion many initiatives to solve it. We have to be optimistic, because the possibilities are many and can be exciting and challenging besides.

One point worth reiterating is a very incisive insight the Pope made on this issue. He said that authentic education, meaning the moral formation and growth of the person, involves the proper use of freedom.

Education cannot simply be a matter of building on past knowledge, because "human freedom is always new and therefore each person and generation must make their own decision in their own name."

"Even the greatest values of the past," he said, "cannot simply be inherited. We only make them our own and renew them through a personal choice which often costs suffering."

The implication of this insight is that to provoke this proper use of freedom, which is what love is all about, parents and teachers should give something of themselves.

"Only in this way, can they help their students to overcome egoism and become capable of authentic love in turn," he said.

Learning to love, not just transmission of technical information, is the essence of education. And God is in the middle of it all, since God is the source, goal and motor of love.

**********

Fr. Roy Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE) in Talamban, Cebu City. You can email him at:Email: roycimagala@boholchronicle.com