The Holy Father has appointed as Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education His Most Reverend Eminence Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, until now Archivist and Librarian of the Holy Roman Church. In this role His Eminence is therefore the new Grand Chancellor of the Pontifical Gregorian University.
Card. Tolentino honoured us with his presence on 24 May 2021, accepting to celebrate the Mass for the conclusion of the first and difficult academic year marked by the pandemic. In his homily, Card. Tolentino made a vibrant appeal to us: 'Precisely on listening to our thirst depends the qualification of our life. A university, for example, is a propitious place to learn thirst. A university student is called to be a thirsty person. I am reminded of what Brazilian theologian and pedagogue Ruben Alves wrote: "Teaching is the art of awakening hunger and thirst in someone's heart and intelligence. If we are not thirsty and hungry, no food seems good to us, everything becomes waste". [...] I would say that the most successful academic path is the one that knows how to arouse thirst, the one that knows how to ignite desire, because - if desire is satisfied before time - the thinking machine does not think, and thought does not happen [...] If we keep ourselves thirsty and desirous, it will be God himself who will descend to our humanity to fill our desire with fullness. In the meantime our desire is attention, vigilance, resilience, faithfulness, trust and much study. And we must see in study and in our scientific research, as in our prayer, expressions of our thirst'.
The former Rector Gonçalves wished to thank Card. Tolentino with these words: 'Your Eminence, in your official biography, it says that you are a "theologian and a poet". This is a happy and truthful synthesis, which is also important in the task that the Holy Father entrusted to you in 2018 as Archivist and Librarian of the Holy Roman Church. In this mission, you continue to serve the Gospel and culture, a mission in which the Gregorian University also recognises itself'.