"It is with great joy that I present a little about myself. My name is João Henrique Funari Fouto and I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, in a well-structured family. I received a good education from my parents and had a very happy childhood.

My parents passed on to me values, love and faith, placed me in a good school and taught me the importance of study. They also gave me a brother and a sister, who, together with our thirteen cousins on my mother's side, guaranteed good company to play with. I see very clearly how important these gifts from God have been to my vocation. My parents' true love has made it easy for me to believe in God's love. Even when I was distant from the faith, I had no doubts about this, because these values (especially my mother's firmness, which was never at odds with her tenderness) and the intensity of my childhood gave me a sense of reality of great importance.

This sense of reality, which includes a great passion for freedom, has made me dream of greater things than parties, fame, etc. However, our faith was, in many ways, weak (in fact some values have not been taught and there was like a discrepancy between what we were told to believe and what we lived) and we lacked a lot to call ourselves exemplary Catholics. To be brief, I would say that there was no real search for holiness. And we know that if someone does not go forward, in the end he goes backwards, and that is what happened to me.

I can't scold anyone for that, because it happened that, after entering the University (I was studying Economics at the University of St. Paul), I gradually developed a life completely opposed to the teaching of Christ. That happened almost "naturally": I had no firm and personal goals, so I did more or less what everybody else did (trying to do better from time to time). Anyway, as the years went by, I began to realize that things were not right and, even though all my friends seemed to be having a good time with our hedonistic life, at a certain point it became clear to me that I had to change. Of all the things going through my head at that moment, one was particularly special: I realized that the people around me were not really aware of their horrible lives, whereas I was. I couldn't find any excuse for not struggling to find true meaning in my life and somehow or other I knew that, at the end of my existence, I was going to regret a lot for not having struggled.

Besides, fighting seemed to me a matter of justice, because I have never deserved the good family I have had. I saw it as an obligation: I had to take the initiative, without waiting for others around me to do it. Since I had received more than my friends, God would certainly ask more of me.

Although I thought of myself as a Catholic, I had no Catholic friends, I lacked formation (I did not know, for example, what a spiritual director is) and I still had a personality to build. It is true that, from that moment on, I continued to fall constantly, and several times a day, but I had decided very firmly to dedicate my whole life to finding God. 

"God doesn't let anyone beat Him in generosity," a priest used to tell me. In fact, for every small step I took, He always answered me proportionately. I finished university (also working, in the last years) and started a master's degree in economics. In the middle of that journey, I saw very clearly what had been in my head for a long time: God was calling me to be a priest. Curiously, since the time of my conversion, even though I was not yet a Catholic in a practical sense, I had already felt the desire to leave everything to enter the seminary or a monastery, and this desire was confirmed after three years. So I abandoned my studies in economics and asked to be admitted to the local diocesan seminary. At that time, I had already been talking to a priest for a year and a half, and it was he who had the idea of proposing to the bishop to send me and another boy from the seminary to study in Rome. The proposal was accepted and for the first time my diocese sent a seminarian to receive formation abroad.

I have been in Rome for years now and I really could not have imagined how beneficial it would have been to come here. The contact with Catholics from all over the world, the very charitable atmosphere of the Sedes Sapientiae Seminary, the Altomonte residence and the quality of our priests, as well as the high level of the academic offerings of our Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, provide a fantastic opportunity for all those who are truly interested in formation.

Of all the positive aspects, I will highlight two: firstly, we are encouraged to pray, everything encourages us to pray, starting with our beautiful and quiet church; secondly, in the university we experience a proper union between faith and reason. There is a great deal of philosophical speculation, but no one is afraid to argue in the light of faith.

Anyway, I can say that I am very happy. It is not that my vocation and happiness depend on the fact that I am here, because it does not, I know that. However, being here surely helps me to be more useful to God's plan in my life. My great desire is to take all this experience to Brazil, where so many souls are waiting for someone who can show them the way to God. I am also very grateful for the opportunity that my benefactors have given me, I pray for them every day and I hope that they also pray for me so that I can adequately reciprocate all that I have received".