On October 18th, the National Ceremony for the Opening of the Academic Year and the Awarding of Diplomas took place, bringing together the academic community to celebrate the new graduates and welcome the new students. The Rector of the UCP, Isabel Capeloa Gil, recalled that "in order to train entrepreneurs of dreams, such as those receiving their diplomas today, the university must promote a deep concern with the reason for things, the context in which they manifest themselves and their impact," she said, adding: "The university is the home of all the world's knowledge, all its memories, all its voices. And that's what makes it so restless and so profoundly universal."
In addition to this reflection, the Rector also highlighted various achievements and projects for the future of the University, including the Francisco and Clara Economics Chair, the development of the new Veritati Campus, and the creation of the 1st Sino-Portuguese Laboratory of Marine and Environmental Sciences.
Paulo Portas, an alumnus of the Lisbon School of the Faculty of Law, shared that "Católica doesn't forget" and left several pieces of advice for the young people present. "Take advantage of what's bright about digital and distance yourself from what's dangerous. Googling is not studying, a tweet is not a degree, a post is not a doctorate, a society of influencers is not a community of sages," he began. "The backpack of knowledge you're carrying from here gives you a great responsibility: not to accept the destruction of knowledge and to promote a culture of demand and quality in public debates today and tomorrow."
Also present at the ceremony was Aníbal Cavaco Silva, who presented the Democracy and Development Prize, which he established in 1995, to two students from the Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics. Expressing his satisfaction at returning to the Catholic University, where he was a professor, he commented that he has "always followed with great interest its commitment to quality, excellence, the dissemination of the values that inform it and the national and international prestige that it has achieved".
In what was his first official session as Magno Chancellor of UCP, the Patriarch of Lisbon, Bishop Rui Valério, closed the ceremony with a prayer and words of congratulations to the entire academic community. "I congratulate and congratulate, because it is an institution where the obligation of the 'I' to open up to the 'whole' is institutionalized. Católica is truly a laboratory of values, of ethics, but above all of humanity," he said.
