A Cultural way to nurture mutual understanding, education, and faith: a 63 year experiment

Abstract

This time of terror and intolerance, including the upsurging of populism, can be considered to be a logical consequence of disregarding or neglecting the dignity of man. It should be borne with trust in the Lord and a peaceful attitude, while continue concentrating on building any bridges possible. One experiment of building bridges was started in year 1955 with the establishment of Parahyangan Catholic University (shortened noticeably to “UNPAR”) in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. West Java with its 47 million population, 2% being christian, is usually identified with a devout muslim culture, and the missionary way chosen by this University is a cultural way. The two founding fathers were the bishops of Bandung and Bogor, and Mgr Geise of Bogor pioneered a way of not using any christian signs in the campus, instead nurturing understanding and education of the staff, to serve the students and their lecturers as dignified human persons. Mgr Geise led the way with his joviality, intensely interested in the personal happiness of everyone in the University, with an strong academic understanding due to his doctoral research of the indigenous attitudes of the Baduy people in the southwestermost part of West Java. Mgr Arntz, a priest with a golden heart, paid personal attention to the happiness of everyone. Not using any christian symbols in the university, except the occasional Eucharistic Mass, surprised and was questioned by fellow catholic unversities for an initial decade, just answered sometimes if we should trigger religious sensitivities in our mission to promote the dignity of the human person. After the decease of the two bishops, this open attitude started to falter, but finally during the past 5 years, that original attitude, still present mostly in the first generation of the staff members, and recovered in its essentials, was formulated with the catchword SINDU, acronym for Spirituality and Basic Values of Unpar. This experiment is intended to be described with some concrete practicalities.