The Mission of the Catholic University. Reflections on Relativism and Mercantilism
In this brief paper, we analyze two of the main threats the Catholic university faces today to fulfill its purposes: university mercantilism and the crisis of truth. University mercantilism is understood as the conversion of a medium, such as the economic sustainability of an educational project, into an end, which makes profitability the backbone of every university institution. Likewise, the reduction of truth and objectivity in the field of experimental sciences limits the speculative horizon of the University and thus its contributions to the service of humankind and society. Throughout the paper, we describe both phenomena, which show how they affect the mission of the Catholic university, described as a search for truth in magisterial documents. At the end of our paper, we propose initiatives to overcome utilitarianism, in the form of mercantilism, and skepticism, disguised as scientism and recovering the truth as the University’s primary purpose and mission.