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SPEECH BY THE HON EDWARD FENECH ADAMI, PRIME MINISTER, AT THE EUROPEAN CONGRESS OF OLD BOYS OF JESUIT SCHOOLS – ST ALOYSIUS COLLEGE, BIRKIRKARA - 3 NOVEMBER 2001
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03/11/2001
03/11/2001
| At Stonyhurst, there exists a well-known manual of advice to Jesuit | masters circulated in 1900 which, among other things, prescribes: "Do not let the boys know anything of your past history. Be among them as though you had dropped from the clouds." |
| I am afraid that I do not have the option to follow | that piece of advice. In any case, I am not a Jesuit master. Rather, I stand before you wearing, metaphorically speaking, two hats. The first, and more obvious one, is that of representative of the country which is happily hosting you. The second, and more intimate hat sitting invisibly on my head, is that of being just one of you. |
| Let me confess at once that, although the two roles | are plainly distinct, they have no tendency at all to create any inner conflict or split personality. |
| The educational policy of my Government rests on two | clear principles. On the one hand, there is a national curriculum to be followed by all schools, which ensures that all citizens of Malta have a basic common background, both of knowledge and of values, as befits a European democracy. On the other hand, every school is required to develop its own way of implementing the curriculum. It is exhorted to cherish its identity, character and autonomy. |
| In this context, I greet you with a flourish of my | first hat. I consider it of great importance that there should be a variety of schools in our country, each of which has a distinct personality and its own pedagogy. |
| In this light, the nature of my other hat may appear | in the eyes of some to be purely incidental, if not accidental. However that may be, I regard it as a precious inheritance to have received. It is already a happy event to receive an education which, while open, is not wishy-washy and indifferent to values, but is marked on the contrary by a definite and recognisable profile. I further maintain that it is doubly happy for this profile to be that of Jesuit humanism. |
| I have already paid tribute to the positive virtues | of pluralism, but that acknowledgement is certainly not equivalent to arguing that all kinds of moral values, or pedagogical systems, are equally valid because all are rationally unsustainable. This is not the time or the place to deploy the arguments for and against that complex position. I will only mention two challenges that are becoming increasingly pressing in the light of the evolving world situation. Both are challenges that we must face responsibly and decisively. |
| The first of these is the emerging anti-humanist bias | in contemporary philosophy. The comprehensible emphasis on the human being as an individual has, because of its very exclusiveness, paradoxically led us to neglect the fact that the very basis of the singularity of the human individual is membership of the human species, and belonging to the community of humankind as a whole. |
| This failure has led not only to the depreciation of | the common heritage of mankind, but also to the eclipse of the dignity of the human person in itself. This is a challenge that is looming large in the political field, with the growing tendency towards a purely economic or market globalisation, unaccompanied by the correlative moral commitments. On this subject, I will only add that our commitment to European integration is rooted primarily in our perception of this process as a vital step towards the re-unification of humanity as a whole, and the renaissance of true humanism. |
| The second challenge stems from the fact that the | heritage of Jesuit humanism that was transmitted to us all was fashioned at the dawn of the modern age. That age has now succumbed with the passage of time to the post-modern age, and its quite different provocations. The idol of the now defunct modern age was Prometheus, who stole the fire of the gods and inspired Man the Worker to develop science and technology on the path of progress without regard to natural limitations. |
| Today, our god is Dionysius, inviting us to transcend | the human condition through total immersion in the media of communication, without much care about its substance. It does not seem as if we have yet really found the appropriate pedagogy for our post-modern age, in the spirit and to the degree achieved by Ignatius and his Company at the dawn of that already distant modern age. |
| In facing up to these two challenges, it might not | prove unfruitful to devote some attention to a case study of the University of Malta. It is, of course, a state-sponsored successor of the early Jesuit College, the Collegium Melitense, set up in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Today, there seems to be hardly a trace of its once typically Jesuit humanist identity. It illustrates how easy it is for an institution to undergo a sort of metempsychosis. |
| There could also occur a sheer loss rather than just | a change of soul. I am not suggesting that there was necessarily any better alternative to what actually happened in the history of the Collegium Melitense. However, it may be more than just bemusing to entertain the hypothesis of what it would have been like to have an institution which had successfully met the double challenge that I articulated: a deep understanding of Jesuit humanism and its permanent adaptation. |
| I will end by recalling another typically concise | instruction from the Stonyhurst manual of 1900, complementary to that urging the mystique of reserve with which I began: "Where you meet one of your boys outside the schoolroom, do anything to show the boy that… you wish…to be…his friend." |
That is, in essence, what I have been trying to show all of you, gathered here today in virtue of a Jesuit connection, with these brief words of greeting.
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