The majestic marble lobby of the Vatican's Gregorian University
echoes like a modern-day Tower of Babel as priests, nuns and seminarians
from 130 countries chat away in their native tongues."When I open the door and hear them, it strengthens my spirits," said Francois-Xavier Dumortier, 64, who has been "magnificent rector" since 2010 at this Jesuit university founded in 1551 by Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
"I am full of hope when I see the people we train here," he told AFP.
The university has emerged as a vital intellectual "hub" for the Catholic Church in the 21st century that is not afraid to experiment with methods and tackle particularly sensitive issues like clerical child abuse.
When the Jesuit priest Dumortier walks the corridors, he said he often stops and chats with the students and finds them to be "very sharp".
Religious superiors and bishops send between 2,500 and 2,800 students to this university every year, including many from impoverished dioceses.
"The bishops write to us and asks for a seminarian or a priest to be enrolled here or for a scholarship. The principle is one of trust," he said.
Half of the university's budget comes from donations through foundations and benefactors, particularly American, British and German ones.
Italians make up 25 percent of the staff but "no-one here is superior to anyone else," he said, although he admitted that the "blend of cultures also has some disconcerting aspects and is accompanied by misunderstandings."
Around 50.3 percent of the students are non-Europeans -- 13 percent are from Asia, 10 percent are from Africa and 27 percent are from the Americas.
The second most widely spoken language after Italian is Spanish.
Fourteen percent of students are women and 18 percent are lay people -- percentages that are still too low, Dumortier said.
The university also has around 130 students who audit classes.
The "Gregorian" as it is widely referred to is made up of six faculties, two institutes and six interdisciplinary centres.
Father Dumortier said he has put particular emphasis on the school's "inter-disciplinarity".
He has also promoted the use of post-graduate tutors to help younger students and introduced a bar to encourage "conviviality".
"I don't want the Gregorian to be a university seminary but a real university. An open place, a new land. The heart of the world has to beat here. We have to reflect on the future here," he said.
Under his leadership, the university hosted a symposium earlier this year on child abuse, with bishops from around the world taking part.
He said this was a serious problem that the Church "has confronted head on".
"If only all the institutions had this courage," he added.
Dumortier said his ultimate ambition was to re-build a "Roman College" like the one that Saint Ignatius had wanted in the 16th century -- a turbulent period of transformation and conflict for Europe.
"The Roman College then was no ghetto. Best practice circulated between different colleges of the nascent Company of Jesus," the Jesuits, he said.
The "Gregorian", he said, needs to apply the lessons of the Church's Vatican II Council of the 1960s for a new generation of Catholics.
The Jesuit vocation is "to impart knowledge but also to instruct man as a whole."
The offering for students apart from formal coursework is highly varied.
The university recently hosted a conference on the Christian roots of US singer Bruce Springsteen's music and a lecture in a packed amphitheatre by Jean Vanier, the French founder of a charity devoted to helping handicapped people.
The library here is the biggest in Rome, with a million volumes and important collections of literature on social and political issues.
The desired outcome, Dumortier said, is to help future clerics "give reason to their faith" since "the language of reason is common to all men."