I am sure that the unexpected death of Monsignor Javier Echevarría has filled those of us who have been part of the academic corporation of the University of Navarra with sorrow. Although we are convinced that God wanted to take him with him to celebrate an eternal Christmas with him, we feel the emptiness that comes with the orphanhood of someone who has been for us, more than our Chancellor, a true father and an exceptional father.

I personally had the good fortune to speak with him on many occasions, and on all of them he conveyed to me his interest in the students. He reminded me that the most important task of the professors is to help each student so that, with freedom, he or she can make decisions for his or her own improvement as a man or woman. That it was necessary to transmit a university style that encouraged the free cultivation and manager of each personality, avoiding even the appearance of trying to corset anyone, reproducing a preconceived stereotype, no matter how excellent it might be. That the genuine contribution of the University to society was that group of students, well trained, humanly and professionally, that each year left its classrooms.
He followed with enthusiasm and healthy pride the professional progress of the professors and the therapeutic advances offered by the University Clinic. He felt a special predilection for the research of the medical area , because he was pained by the suffering of the sick, whom he visited whenever he was among us.

When, due to the peaceful possession of his name, the University of Navarra was involved in a dispute with the Public University, he urged me to be magnanimous, so that no trace of rancor would remain at the end of the dispute and that the relationship between the two institutions would be cordial and noble partnership.

At the beginning of May 2002, the University of Navarra was the target of a terrorist attack. At that time I was in Rome, invited by our Chancellor. When he heard about it, he came to keep me company to reassure me of my concern. He encouraged me to forgive and pray for those who had committed it, assuring me that God would help the University more in its task of service to the Church and society if we forgave from the heart.

Don Javier Echevarría was a great university man, but above all he was a priest deeply immersed in God, in love with Jesus Christ, who didn't think of himself. St. Josemaría, whom he loved filially, said that he would like to die working for others, squeezed like a lemon. And so it was with the death of Don Javier. I think that the simplicity and naturalness with which he spent his last years should not hide from us that, when squeezing, while the first drop of the lemon comes out easily, the last is much more difficult and sometimes almost impossible. And in this case it has been an epic, albeit silent, heroic one.