My first experience in this new role was at the III World Congress on the Pastoral Care of International Students in Rome. I
participated with the Canadian delegation, and many of the
other country delegations had student participants from Pax
Romana. IYCS was invited and IMCS outgoing IT members
at the time were invited as speakers.
I
n an increasingly globalized world, we encounter different
cultures on a regular basis. As young adults, most of us
have grown up with an understanding of a world that is totally
interconnected. Most of us cannot even envision what the world
might be like without it. Our generation has accessibility to so
many forms of cultural and social exchange that our parents and
grandparents might not have had the opportunity for during their
undergraduate studies, if they were able to attend university at all.
But in Pax Romana, we see a tradition over our history of an international movement whose mission has been to build solidarity
among our nations that celebrate our different cultures, even
amongst the differences each has. Our movement has a culture of
its own that values bringing peace, justice, and solidarity to the
world around us. Our common threads are our identity as Catholics, our work as student leaders, and our gifts as critical thinkers.
At our 90th Anniversary, I learned from former Pax Romana students (now ICMICA members) why this movement was formed
and what it allowed us to be: students with a love for the university
and a love for the Church, who wanted to use their critical thinking
learned on campus, to respond to the issues of our contemporary
world in a Catholic way. This message and mission that I understand through our intergenerational dialogue with ICMICA members, has helped me immensely in the work I now do with Pax
Romana as North American Co-ordinator.
This has been the first time the Pontifical Council for Migrants
and Itinerant Peoples has invited university students to engage
in the sessions. They wanted us to understand the lived experiences of international students and the local students who accompany them through their time at university, so that together
we could better identify the guidance campus ministry could
offer to international students. This congress understood that as
easily as students can embrace and appreciate a new culture, we can also just
as easily be lost in that new culture, and lose sense of our own in the process
(or upon our transition back home). When experienced in this way, culture
becomes a challenge to the student who returns to their home country and re
-integrate into their community.
The question that was raised: ‘how do we integrate culture with education?’
and the answer was: ‘campus ministry.’ Although university prepares students to do well academically, especially in the case of international students, it can lack in preparing leaders who will be able to contribute to building a community that is good and just. So campus ministries hold the integral role of providing students with a faith-life that encourages them to share
their culture with the host country and to find and use the skills that will
allow them to succeed in their home country.
With a strong presence as Pax Romana student leaders, we were able to
model how academic-life can integrate with faith-life with the international
family we have built across our national movements. The leaders of the
Church that were present looked upon us as students who are already being
actively formed as leaders, as students who want to be leaders.
Pope Benedict XVI, in his address to the congress called the university
“laboratories of humanity.” As an international family, our movement has
shown its capacity to accompany university students as actual agents of social change through their academic career than be just thinkers.
IMCS Pax Romana | Newsletter– Special Edition| 2012-2013
By Katrina Laquian,
CoI MCS North American Co-ordinator
www.imcs-miec.org
19