Vatican City, Nov 15, 2018 / 16:13 pm
Pope Francis encouraged the community of the Pontifical Latin American College Thursday to avoid cultural fragmentation and to be close to their people.
"One of the phenomena currently afflicting the continent is cultural fragmentation, the polarization of the social fabric and the loss of roots," the pope said Nov. 15 in the Clementine Hall of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace.
"This is exacerbated when arguments are fomented that divide and propagate different types of confrontations and hatred towards those who 'are not one of us', even importing cultural models that have little or nothing to do with our history and identity and that, far from combining in new syntheses as in the past, end up uprooting our cultures from their richest autochthonous traditions.
He spoke to the community to mark the 160th anniversary of the college's founding. He noted that it "is one of the few Roman Colleges whose identity does not refer to a nation or a charism, but which seeks rather to be the meeting place, in Rome, of our Latin American land … offering you, young priests, the opportunity to create a vision, a reflection and an experience of communion that is expressly 'Latin Americanized'."