International Mix at Salesian Pontifical University

Today is the feast of Bl. Michele Rua. There were specialties at dinner and a little reception in the dinning room lobby after dinner, but I was not able to take part due to the fact that I had to run to teach my class on Salesian Spirituality to those of the First Cycle (Bachelor's level). After a couple of little technical difficulties, we were able to get that class off to decent start, finally. Not great, but decent.


Of 37 students enrolled in that course, on 5 are Italians, and maybe 5 others are Europeans. The vast majority are Africans and Asians. This is very different from when I studied theology at the "UPS Sezione Torino" 30 years ago. At that time, I was the only non-Italian among 60 theology students. When I returned to Italy in 1990 to do advanced studies in spiritual theology, there were a good number of Latin Americans who matched the number of Europeans, with a few Indians and fewer East Asians. It was less than a year from the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and during my first year, the Soviet Union collapsed totally when Gorbachev was kidnapped by radicals (all events that I watched on Italian television). We has a good number of Polish students and a few Eastern Europeans who were the first to have the opportunity for studies in the West in nearly two generations. At that time I belonged to the student community of "Don Rua" and I have wonderful memories of those days, as I do of my "first cycle" days at Torino. I saw the Salesian congregation as youthful and ethusisastic, thanks to those attributes that I could identify in my peers.

Now, as I say, the Latin Americans are as scarce as the Europeans; the Poles have more professors than students, but the Eastern European student population has risen.

Our university population is increasingly international, with students from 115 nations... There are many eastern Europeans, Latin Americans, Indians, Africans, East Asians, and even a little colony of Filipino students. Most of the Italian students here are enrolled in the faculties of education, psychology, catechetics and social communications. The vast majority of these students are local, actually citizens of Rome itself.

And from the USA? there is only one student, Peter by name, whom I came to know two years ago. He is from California -- from Fresno to be exact. He has come here to study Latin and Greek. The UPS is off the beaten track for people from the USA who want to have a Roman experience, I suppose. Many would expect to be close to the Vatican or to the historic center of the ancient capital, caput mundi. Instead, we are on the northern rim of the expanding metropolis, in a very blue-collar district. But that is a very cool place to be, when you think of the Salesian mission.


All these are thoughts that come to mind on the feast of Michele Rua, who pushed to spread the Salesian Family to become operative on all Five Continents. Thanks, Don Rua! I hope you are happy with what you see at this Salesian Pontifical University in 2007.