ROME—In the last few years alone, the world has witnessed terrorism and bioterrorism. Then there were the business scandals at top global companies. Then, of course, there were the Church scandals.

But the expanded and rebuilt Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, run by the Legionaries of Christ, has answers to all of that.

The school recently introduced three master's degree programs in applied ethics. The programs, initiated in 2001, were set up to reflect the increasing need to address an escalating moral crisis in corporate culture, religious life and the social-physical sciences.

The new environmental science, faith and science, and psychological consultation programs all follow the educational objectives instituted by the school's bioethics faculty.

“The main goal of these [specialized] degrees,” according to the university's president, Legionary Father Paolo Scarafoni, “is to allow both lay professionals and religious to deepen their knowledge of the principles of ethically responsible care and management… in light of the Church's social doctrine. They attest to a new abundance of moral dilemmas brought on by technical-scientific applications of reason.”

While most of the school's theology and philosophy students are seminarians and young priests, Father Scarafoni said, the majority of master's degree students are laymen and laywomen. They come from all walks of life, he said: Scientists, medical doctors, businessmen and journalists “seeking to be better activists and moral leaders in their specific fields.”

Father Scarafoni said the university is launching a degree for advanced studies in political science this year, and there are tentative plans to add a master's degree program in business ethics, a program already at the school's sister universities in Spain and Mexico.

The athenaeum's board, he said, is particularly concerned about contemporary society's abandonment of the ancient Christian principles of natural law and the sacredness of the person.

“We are especially interested in ethics applied to social responsibility … for our God-given resources,” he said. Globalization of immoral practices and concepts, Father Scarafoni said, “now takes center stage in the science of human conduct.”

Father Scarafoni said there is a difficult balance to be struck in applying ethical studies to a critique of contemporary business and scientific aims.

“We follow closely the neutral ideologies of a very courageous Pope John Paul II, who seeks the true solidarity among all men and women found in truth … while at the same time affirming the belief in Genesis that man was put on earth to dominate his environment,” he said.

The university's master's degree in faith and science, on the other hand, specifically reflects an educational philosophy that “defends reason's ability to grasp moral and speculative truth deeply and with certitude,” said Father Thomas Williams, dean of theology at the university.

Man's skepticism regarding reason is related to his skepticism regarding revelation and thus, Father Williams said, “the contemporary crisis of the human person and his inviolable dignity is symptomatic of man's loss of faith in and reverence for God.”

He said the faith and science degree “is grounded in a theological and philosophical anthropology that sees the human person as imaging the Creator, both in his intelligence and in his vocation to communion. … Theology, then, must have more than a speculative dimension. It must also offer a spiritual, ethical and evangelizing dimension to those who pursue it.”

Expansion

The new degree programs are possible thanks to the university's much-enlarged state-of-the-art campus inaugurated in December 2000. The original campus, located two miles from its current hilltop address, did not provide adequate facilities for offering new degrees that, in turn, require additional classrooms, research facilities, offices and auditoriums.

“The old structure was simply lacking in space,” Father Scarafoni said.

At the new location, however, he said, “we have a genuine campus, with ample classrooms and library space for more than 1 million volumes.”

In addition, the school now has computer labs and auditoriums with multiple teleconferencing hookups.

“Our plans for [academic] expansion are now realistic,” Father Scarafoni said. Each year the school's facilities receive more than 2,600 students and professors hailing from more than 30 different countries.

Regina Apostolorum's students seem pleased with the new programs and facilities as well.

“The university's unique position consists in offering hi-tech facilities, world-class professors and progressive programs … all strategically perched just above the hustle and bustle of the Aurelian Way yet tranquilly immersed in natural bucolic pastures of roaming sheep, vines and olive groves,” said Dr. Juan Manuel Estrella, a doctoral student in bioethics and a cardiologist from Argentina. “Its gardens and open space … invite moral reflection of society's problems found at just a brief distance.”

Father Scarafoni said the university's new advanced degrees and modern facilities are keeping in line with John Paul's repeated emphasis for a New Evangelization within education.

The Pope's call involves much more than a body of enthusiastic students and professors faithful to the principles of Revelation, natural law, Tradition and the magisteri-um, he said.

“But more so,” he said, “it signifies a new and fervent application of modern means in working out contemporary social issues in and outside the classroom.”

High-Tech

Lectures and conferences are transmitted via satellite hookups to distance-learning centers in the form of “virtual” course offerings. Conventions and conferences offer simultaneous transmission to conferees in a 450-seat auditorium.

The university's modern facilities and technological means have hosted international conferences on pressing issues such as stem cell research, genetically modified biotech foods and Internet-use regulations. In October, Regina Apostolorum Pontifical Athenaeum hosted a three-day roundtable discussion on global business practices, with major industrial leaders as participants. The university has also recently allied itself with three other pontifical universities to discuss these issues as part of the Vatican's Pontifical Council of Culture.

George Weigel, senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and one of several ethics scholars to have co-organized conferences at the university's Rome campus, said the use of modern media equipment implied in the Pope's millennium message to Catholic educators means “Regina Apostolorum takes very seriously the Pope's call to evangelize high culture. It is an evangelization of intellectual engagement that will only grow more influential in the years and decades ahead.”

When asked what influence the athenaeum presently has in international moral dialogue, Weigel said, “Regina Apostolorum has certainly been at the forefront of efforts to take [ethical] issues seriously … Being a newer institution, it is a little more flexible and a little more adventurous than some of the more established centers, and that is all to its advantage.”

Michael A. Severance writes from Rome.