This was our view as we dined together, all of us graduate students in Rome, atop the Pontifical North American College. The sun sets just atop the Vatican City State, in the shadow of the famed dome of the Vatican Basilica!
My colleague was just then telling me of how the Catholic church invented the univeristy. One can look to the oldest univeristies in the world: Bologna, Coimbra, Paris, Oxford, Salamanca, Padua, Cambridge, Rome, Lisbon, Prague, Vienna, Heidelberg, Louvain, Cracow, etc., and they were all born of the mystic climate of Catholic Europe. Of the 52 universities founded before the year A.D. 1400, 29 of them were established directly by the Popes and 10 others by both an emperor's or prince's decree together with a Papal decree.
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