In an interview with Vatican News, Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi discussed the work of the Congregation for Catholic Education and its 29 employees.

Cardinal Versaldi, who has led the Congregation since 2015, discussed the Pope’s Global Compact on Education, the pandemic, and his desire “to ensure the quality of the doctrinal teaching offered and to safeguard the integrity of the Catholic faith” at pontifical institutions.

“We are facing a sort of ‘educational catastrophe’ due to the fact that about ten million children were forced to leave school” because of lockdowns, he said. The prelate called for “a new cultural model to change the current model of development and to adopt pedagogical paradigms capable of safeguarding the dignity of the human person, of promoting adequate socialization processes within the perspective of universal fraternity, and to promote a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge to form the younger generations as protagonists of the common good.”