HomeNewsSt Josemaría on the campus of La Sabana University, Colombia
News

St Josemaría on the campus of La Sabana University, Colombia

March 12, 2007

Tags: University, Pictures and statues of St Josemaria Escriva
A statue of St Josemaría was put up at the beginning of 2007 in a square called “Plazoleta de los Arcos” in the University of La Sabana, Colombia.

The original sculpture in plaster, 1.8 metres high, was modeled in the Angelis workshops and the final bronze cast was then taken from this sculpture. The sculptor was Luis Heraclio Guevara, and his assistants. The design and artistic director was the architect Arturo Guerrero Pérez. The final bronze statue was cast by Jorge Avila.

The sculpture aims to recreate the expressive gesture of St Josemaría’s arms and hands as he appealed to his hearers to put what he was telling them into practice. His face shows a gentle smile, as it habitually did in reality. The hands are particularly expressive, having been worked on with special care by the sculptors.

La Sabana University commissioned this statue in gratitude to the person who inspired its beginnings. From the early 1960s St Josemaría had encouraged several educationalists in Colombia to set up an institute of higher education. In 1971 the Instituto Superior de Educación began functioning in an old but welcoming house in the Chapinero district of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, with nineteen students and seven lecturers. The overall motivation of the founders of the university was their concern to give a high level of education and training to future teachers in rural areas, offering rigorous academic courses and deeply Christian cultural training as well. “A university”, said St Josemaría, as reported in Conversations, 74, “must educate its students to have a sense of service to society, promoting the common good with their professional work and their activity. University people should be responsible citizens with a healthy concern for the problems of other people and a generous spirit which brings them to face these problems and to resolve them in the best possible way. It is the task of universities to foster these attitudes in their students.”

The campus of La Sabana University currently occupies over 60 hectares in the Municipality of Chia, just a few kilometers outside Bogotá, and it has 266 lecturers on its staff.