The new President of President of Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan, Fr Roberto “Bobby” Yap SJ began his term with a strong message regarding man’s need to reconcile with recreation.
In his Inaugural Address on August 15, Fr Bobby declared that “care for the environment is certainly one of the most crucial and most challenging” frontiers a university can strive to reach, and announced two environmental stewardship projects he will focus on – making the campus green and adapting to climate change.
“Ateneo de Cagayan will be a green campus … but … with a blue heart … a heart that appreciates the goodness of creation and discerns the active presence of God within creation,” he said.
The university will pursue the mandate given to XU by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities Asia Pacific to become a prototype green campus for Jesuit schools in the region. Accordingly, Ateneo de Cagayan will use environment-friendly cleaning agents; promote a styrofoam-free campus; operate a Materials Recovery Facility; reduce the volume of waste dumped at the city landfill; manage the trees on campus grounds by pruning, landscaping and treating tree diseases; practice composting of yard and fruit wastes; set up a rainwater catchment system; and do regular energy audits and improve energy efficiency.
In addition, awareness and training programmes will be organised so that the whole university community is mobilised to maintain a green campus.
As for climate change, Fr Bobby called this “arguably the foremost environmental challenge of our time”, and said he feels, as an environmental economist, that the primary response of the Philippines should be adapting to the effects of climate change. As a tropical archipelago, the impact of climate change on the Philippines means that the hot seasons will become hotter and the wet seasons wetter. There will be more droughts and more flooding. Typhoons will strike with increasing frequency and intensity.
Adaptation must also be a major theme of the university’s research and social outreach agenda, he said, agreeing with the vision of Xavier University’s Research and Social Outreach of a food-secure, climate change-resilient and sustainable Mindanao.
He sees the Ridges-to-Rivers-to-Reefs programme as crucial in assessing the vulnerability of the ecosystem to climate change.
“Disaster risk reduction and disaster management should be the concern not only of our environmental scientists who will tell us which areas would be most vulnerable but as well as our social scientists who will help communities cope with natural disasters and calamities,” he said.
“Our engineers will be faced with the challenge of building better irrigation, water-catchment and flood control systems. Our medical doctors and nurses with the challenge of controlling possible epidemics of flood-related and vector-borne diseases. Our agriculturists and biologists with the challenge of developing heat- or water- resistant seeds.”
“And our efforts at adaptation must always ensure that we give special attention to the poorest of the poor who live in the margins, in ecologically-fragile areas, in the geographic frontiers.”
The efforts to reconcile with creation will mean greater societal engagement, which is one of the three University Development Goals – Stronger Formation, Greater Societal Engagement and Better Administration – first articulated by Fr Bobby’s predecessor Fr Jett Villarin SJ.
These goals are well aligned with the 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, which called Jesuits to a mission of reconciliation, a mission to establish right relationships – reconciliation with God, reconciliation with creation, reconciliation with one another.
In his speech, Fr Bobby also spoke of his plans to achieve the goals of Stronger Formation (commitment to right relationships with God) and Better Administration (commitment to right relationships with one another).
Fr Bobby’s dream is to turn XU into the best Xavier University for the 21st century, for Ateneo de Cagayan to become a flourishing Filipino, Catholic and Jesuit academic institution serving vigorously and creatively the needs of Mindanao, the Philippines and Asia-Pacific.
This he believes is possible if all within the university respond as Mary, our Blessed Mother, did to God, which theologian Walter Burghardt described as “an open-ended yes to life as it unfolds”.
Said Fr Bobby: “If we say yes to the invitation to explore the frontiers as friends in the Lord with fire burning in our hearts, we can be certain that God will ceaselessly surprise us by carrying us on a most extraordinary adventure that would be larger than our dreams and beyond our imagining. And most amazing of all, God will always be present with us amidst all the surprises.”
Click here to read Fr Bobby’s full speech.
Reconciliation with creation is a priority engagement for the Jesuit Conference of Asia Pacific. To find out what the Jesuits in Asia Pacific are doing to reconcile with creation, go to https://jcapsj.org/what-we-do/ecology
The Jesuit Conference of Asia Pacific has a carbon offset scheme, called Flights for Forests. Click here to learn about it and participate.