Before the end of the twelfth century when the Universities came into existence, the intellectual life of Europe was centred in the monasteries. It was not an intellectual life of great vigour, breadth or profundity, for the Benedictine lectio was concerned more with devotion than with scholarship. Yet it served to keep at bay the barbarism and ignorance that threatened to engulf the Church, and contrived to make in its multiplication of manuscripts a small but precious contribution to Christian civilisation. It was insufficient, however, for the educational needs of the pastoral clergy, and for that reason the Church found herself obliged to erect Cathedral schools as training grounds for her own ministers. The immediate effect of this policy was to lessen the prestige of the monasteries as intellectual centres : and this, added to the changing economic conditions and the increasing prosperity of the towns, resulted in the final emergence of the Cathedral schools as the focal points of culture. From these schools, founded by Bishops and designed mainly as seminaries for their clergy, the universities took their rise.

Of all these Paris was by far the most celebrated. Whereas at Orleans, Bologna, Salerno and Toledo, studies were almost exclusively confined to arts, or law, or medicine or physics, at Paris no specialisation was attempted. Roman law and Canon law, Aristotle and Peter Lombard, the new Euclid and the new Ptolemy, the Greek and Arabic physicians, all these had their masters and their students. And as strict supervision over studies and scholars was very difficult, all this feverish intellectual activity, all this jostling of humanists, jurists and theologians, coud only lead to extravagance and disorder. John de Hauteville has described in his Architrenius the resulting chaos, violence and squalor of student life in Paris.

In its beginnings the thing we call a University ran ahead of its idea of itself. It grew, not unintelligently, but with little, if any, reflection on itself. Subsequently, and especially in the last hundred years, there has been much speculation about what a University should be; and there have been many experiments in erecting theory into fact. The palm for the best theory unquestionably goes to John Henry Newman, and so to the Catholics of England, whom he claimed, and is now allowed, to represent. No theory, anywhere, remains more remote from fact than this remains in England.

This may be blameworthy, but there is some excuse for it. The English are not idealists, their genius is practical. They do not proceed from ideas to action : they act first and think afterwards, with a tendency, stronger in each generation, to think that what they have done or left undone was rightly done or left undone because ‘twas they themselves that did it or did it not. On this general ground, and on the ground of its particular application to education, especially University education, the claim of English Catholics to be truly English cannot be denied. In this characteristic the Irish amongst them are thoroughly anglicized. As a body Catholics in this country are not at all dissatisfied with what they have done or not done for themselves in education these last hundred years. Their dissatisfaction is almost wholly with what others have done or not done for them. Exceptions there are: mostly converts like Newman himself, and idealists like him. Like him they love the life of the mind, and follow it even to its own surrender in faith; and like him, until they are safely dead, they become generally suspect of not being quite English. All this, though irritating, is excusable in England. Even the Universal Church finds it, though vexatious, tolerable.

It is not my intention in my description of the University of Malta in any way to suggest that this institution is a model, or even a particularly good example of what a Catholic University should be. It is, however, very well worth studying for two reasons. First, because it is unique of its kind, being the only Catholic University (I suppose) in the world which is also a State University supported and controlled by a non-Catholic government. Second, because its history and present state show very clearly that in order to secure a thorough and adequate intellectual and spiritual Catholic formation it is not enough to establish an officially Catholic University, with statutes which make the Catholic religion the basis of instruction and a staff of teachers who profess the Catholic religion. That is only the beginning. It is still necessary to give the body a living and reasonable soul, to make the University a real University and its Catholicism a living and productive faith. The University of Malta never seems quite to have found its soul.

It was founded by Grand Master Pinto de Fonceca of the Sovereign Order of Malta in 1769, and endowed with the buildings and property of the College of the Society of Jesus which the Grand Master had suppressed in 1768. Perhaps something of the atmosphere of Baroque Erastianism has clung about the University from its beginnings. Certainly the Founder, Grand Master Pinto, was a typical enough representative of that pompous and spiritually barren autocracy. From 1769 to the present day the University has continued to exist and function without a break except for a short period during the French occupation of Malta in the time of Napoleon.

Lille was at one time the capital of Flanders, and from the early Middle Ages has held an important place in both the religious and military history first of Flanders, then of France. In the early nineteenth century it became the centre of a great industrial area, largely due to its climate and to the coal and iron deposits in its neighbourhood. The nearest parallel that one can find in the rise of industrialism in England is Lancashire, and one may well call the department of the Nord, including as it does Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Fives, Bethune and Lens, the Lancashire of France.

Due to the efforts of a few industrialists and manufacturers, a beginning was made in 1874 with a Catholic University; subscriptions poured in, so that in 1875 the four faculties of law, science, letters and medicine were inaugurated. These, with a more recent addition of a faculty of theology, have remained the nucleus of the University, which is usually styled the Facultés Libres to distinguish it from the secular Facultds d’Etat. It is of interest that as early as 1897, following the lead of Oxford and Cambridge, University Extension lectures were established throughout the regions around the city. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of these was the annual Ecole Normale des dirigeants ouvriers chrétiens, which lasted a fortnight, was attended by the leaders of the Christian working class movements of the whole of the north of France and was addressed by professors from the Catholic University.

It was only natural that the University, set in the midst of an industrial area, should specialise in technical subjects; and there were founded successively an institute of higher industrial studies, and a school of industrial arts and crafts. Later came a department of Social Service and a school of Journalism.