The Pontifical University of Comillas in Spain recently send a survey to alumni to help improve services. Questions included requesting age, place of residence, degree, employment situation, or areas of interest of Comillas alumni.
The form also asked respondents to affirm their“gender” as male, female, or “other” in contradiction with Christian anthropology.
The University was originally founded in 1890 by Leo XIII for the formation of candidates for the priesthood. They opened to lay people in the late 1960’s. Both ecclesiastical and secular courses are available.
The use of this language appears to be a statement contradicting Christian anthropology and the institution’s Identity and Mission Declaration, which says that it is “a university established by the Holy See, whose governance has been entrusted to the Society of Jesus. This reality is essential to our mission and confers on it a specific profile.”
The institution “assumes, with all its consequences, the Christian conception” of the human being. Thus “there can be no university formation that succeeds in being integral and establishes authentic values, if it is not governed by a certain conception of man.”
Pope Francis has affirmed that gender ideology “presents a society without gender differences and voids the anthropological foundation of the family.”
The departure from the University’s Catholic founding is apparent from their mission and values statement:
After a century of university experience, at COMILLAS we are keenly aware that a great many things have changed since the university was founded. Spanish universities have moved on from the education of a select social minority toward a more universal social mission. Catholicism is no longer the Official State Religion and the Church has lived through the fruitful opening of the Second Vatican Council. Spanish society has assumed a more European and even global character.
The effect of these profound changes on COMILLAS can be seen in the University’s move from Comillas to Madrid, in the broad expansion of its educational offer (Humanities and Technical Sciences as well as Ecclesiastic Sciences) and in its ongoing commitment to evolution and modernization based on solid and permanent foundations. Our university mission is firmly rooted within the framework of this evolutionary process, of the growing plurality of Spanish universities and new social and ecclesiastic needs and challenges.
However, when it comes to defining this mission we are all too aware of the lacuna that will always exist between the ideal and the actual reality of the human world.
