07.02.2026 

The protagonists the world needs must not be confused with celebrities. For that reason, educational institutions, while open to change, cannot be neutral, nor become a swamp or quicksand. “The true protagonism of schools and universities is realized only insofar as they educate and empower new protagonists—their graduates, the young people who will genuinely shape and manage the future,” Isabel Capeloa Gil told participants at the General Conference of the Global Network of the RSHM Schools, which concluded today in Lisbon.

In a speech entitled Protagonists of Tomorrow – Students for the Challenges of the 21st Century, the Rector of the Portuguese Catholic University stated that it is “urgent to create the conditions for every student to discover their voice, develop critical thinking, and learn to collaborate with those who think differently.” Quoting Pope Francis in the Apostolic Exhortation Querida Amazonia, she noted that “education must cultivate without uprooting, promote growth without weakening identity, and support without being intrusive.”

She stressed that “the human person is not a profile of competencies, nor can they be reduced to an algorithm: each person has a history and a vocation,” adding that it is necessary “to look at the student before us as a whole person.” “In the age of digital technologies, the mandate of ethically responsible education requires the abolition of disciplinary monocultures and, above all, the empowerment of young people for a new form of discernment.” In her view, it is precisely the inability to distinguish “between fact and fiction, between truth and falsehood” that creates risks for democracies.

The importance of mastering language was another aspect highlighted by Isabel Capeloa Gil, who recalled that “our responsibility toward language is not merely instrumental, but anthropological and cultural. The literary freedom of expression is fundamental to a path of hope.” She added: “Reading means allowing oneself to be penetrated by another person’s reasoning. Polarization is, in fact, the result of the erosion of literacy and of the freedom that is inherent in all language.”

Warning that the future is not somewhere on the horizon but rather “sitting in front of us every day, waiting to be taken seriously,” she emphasized that “the role of the Catholic school, in the face of contemporary challenges, is to strive confidently and wholeheartedly, trusting in the value of its principles, against ‘the stagnation of everything that lives in the change to which it is condemned’ (Fernando Pessoa).” By doing so, it can transform change from a threat into the instrument of its deepest mission: “to contribute to the integral development of the human person and to the common good,” she concluded.