Between Impact Research and Rootedness in the Community

The race for high ranking and the search for impact risks are exhausting universities and distracting them from their original vocation. This is all the more true if we are led to eliminate all training that cannot guarantee its usefulness (understood as a contribution to growth and economic development). In this game, theology is immediately eliminated. Conceived as “useless,” it cannot manage to maintain its place in the universities, defined as a place of training for the workforce—unless we come to otherwise define the usefulness of a university discipline. Pope Francis’s proposal, in the introduction to the Apostolic Constitution Veritatis gaudium, not only argues in favour of the usefulness of theology but invites ecclesiastical studies to a radical change of paradigm if they want to play a key role in the development of a new humanism. It is this original proposal that is presented here.