Gratefully Paying Respect to our Beloved Pope Francis, Who Guided and Encouraged us as a Father

Following the passing of His Holiness, CLAYSS-Uniservitate wishes to express our deep sorrow and immense gratitude for his teaching and, in particular, for his guidance, appreciation and promotion of solidarity service-learning (SSL).

Since the inception of Uniservitate, the Pope has encouraged the development of this global network which, he stated, consistently responds to the goals of the Global Compact on Education by cultivating educational processes that engage everyone.

Uniservitate’s last meeting with the Holy Father was in November 2024, when he held a private audience of 120 participants at the V Global Symposium in Rome. On that occasion, after delivering a message emphasizing the value of the solidarity service-learning approach, Francis warmly and tenderly greeted each student, professor and authority from Catholic universities in 35 countries.

In 2021, already in his first public message of support for Uniservitate, during the II Global Symposium, the Holy Father encouraged us “to continue working to ensure that Catholic educational institutions strengthen their identity and mission, with projects that go beyond the purely academic, and educate the heads, hearts and hands of their graduates in solidarity and fraternity.”

The following year, at the closing of the III Global Symposium held in Rome, the Pope welcomed the students who won the Uniservitate Award after one of his audiences in St. Peter’s Square. During the IV Uniservitate Global Symposium, held in 2023 in the Philippines, Francis surprised everyone with a handwritten message, again underlining that service-learning promotes that head, heart and hands speak the same “language”. Two months later, in January 2024, the Holy Father personally expressed his appreciation for Uniservitate’s work to the programme’s coordinator, Maria Rosa Tapia, and CLAYSS executive director, Enrique Ochoa. At the conclusion of the meeting of rectors organized by the International Federation of Catholic Universities (IFCU) in Rome, Tapia and Ochoa presented him with a copy of one of Uniservitate’s publications. Pope Francis thanked them and said, “You are working very well.” In addition, in their final dialogue, he also encouraged our director and alma mater, Nieves Tapia. As they posed for the group photo at the end of the audience last November, Nieves told the Pope that at CLAYSS “we continue to stir things up.” He replied, “And we have to stir up even more.”

These gestures and words strengthen our commitment, with the certainty that we now have a Father who will intercede with the Lord for all of us all.