ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the Catholic university emerges from the nature and purpose of the human person, understood through the self-giving activity of Christ. It discusses the nature of "values" that are fundamental to the late John Paul II's philosophical analysis of what it means to act ethically and argues that these also form the basis of a curriculum developed by Mary C. Gentile: Giving Voice to Values (GVV), which have found helpful for teaching ethics to those training for the professions at University of Notre Dame Australia (UNDA). Given that the human person is central to the Catholic university, as John Paul II makes clear, study of human nature, of the various aspects of personhood and of the relationship to the world, is undertaken in the humanities and the sciences. The theological framework necessary to finding what, or who, that person is, is specifically Christological: everything that the university does must have its source in Christ's self-giving love.
