Carlito Bernardes is thirty years old and comes from Abadiana (Brazil). He is currently student of the licentiate degree in Theology at the University of Navarra. He says that since he was 3 years old he had the desire to become a priest, when he saw the priests who went to the countryside, where he lived with his family. And he remembers with illusion the time he spent at seminar Menor, in Sao Paulo, where he entered when he was only 13 years old.

He always felt the support of his family to become a priest, but he also had those who did not understand him because of his youth: "Serving God is never wasted time", he used to tell them. In 2008 he came to study the high school diploma in Theology. When he finished, in June 2012, he returned to Brazil. He was ordained in September 2012. There he has served as a diocesan priest until his return to Pamplona last September: "This is my work now, although it is strange. You find everything the same but you are not the same. After a life in a parish, to take a chair and sit down to study is not easy".

About his time at seminar Bidasoa International, where he was formed when he was studying at high school program in Pamplona, he emphasizes the freedom they instilled in him when it came to making decisions: "I began to create my own convictions, which later helped me as a priest. I don't do things because someone imposes them on me, but because I, who am before God, want to do them".

He is very grateful for the financial aid received from the benefactors to be able to study at the University, and is moved when he tells that at the University he has learned to be a "soldier for any battle", as he himself says: "We must be the joker in the deck to help the Church wherever and in the best way possible".

He is aware that in a materialistic society, where consumerism and a hedonistic mentality prevail, the priesthood, which seeks to share the sufferings of the Cross, is not understood. To explain this, he recalls the words of St. Teresa of Jesus when she said "if Jesus sends his sufferings to his best friends, I understand that he does not have many friends". "To be a priest is to be another Christ. We must change the advertising of the priest, is to have nothing and have everything at the same time," he says.