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Salient. The Newspaper of Victoria University College. Vol. 20, No. 4. May 3, 1956

BBC advisor addresses big CSG meeting

BBC advisor addresses big CSG meeting

More than 150 attended a meeting of the Catholic Students' Guild to hear Rev. Father Agnellus Andrew, O.F.M., Catholic advisor to the BBC speaking on "The Church, the University and the World." Fr. Andrew concentrated on the functions, origins and prospect for survival of the University and the culture out of which it sprang.

People went to University for a variety of reasons, he said: to carry the sum total of their knowledge beyond the school level, to prepare for a career, to get a desirable label, or to gain entrance to a certain class of society.

"But the University should do more than this," said Fr. Andrew. It should range over the whole field of human culture and help achieve a synthesis from which would proceed a philosophy of life.

Fr. Andrew emphasized the historical connection between the Church and the University. Not only, for example, was the inspiration for the founding of Oxford entirely religious, but the University of Glasgow had been founded in accordance with a papal Bull.

Hence the idea that education had always been a state preserve into which the Church had barged was wrong.

Today the centre of activity was shifting from the Mediterranean, the cradle of our culture and Christianity. Hence, their future lay in the New World. Here there was a need for champions who understood the Christian faith. The prime essential for these was quality. Everything depended not so much on what we did as on what we were, said Father Andrew.

"If we were the people that Christ expected us to be we would go a long way towards saving Christianity," he said. If the people living in the streets looking in our eyes Were to see Christ shining back at them, we would not find the difficulty we do, he said. There is a tremendous responsibility on that minority which is within Christian civilization, said Father Andrew.

Father Andrew

Father Andrew