MANILA, Sept. 2 – Father Gregory Ramon Gaston has been appointed as the next rector of the Pontificio Collegio Filippino in Rome.
According to an article posted on the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) news website, the Congregation of the Catholic Education (for Seminaries and Educational Institutions) reported Gaston’s appointment.
Among his duties as rector is to oversee the management of the Pontificio Collegio Filippino, the residence for Filipino priests doing further studies in Rome.
The place is a community that provides a special type of ongoing priestly formation that is significantly influenced by a proximity to the Pope and the cultural diversity that only Rome provides.
Zenon Cardinal Grocholewski, congregations’ prefect, also sent a communiqué to the Manila Archdiocese informing about Gaston’s appointment.
The new official of the Pontificio Collegio Filippino will succeed Monsignor Ruperto Santos, who was appointed bishop of the Diocese of Balanga in April.
Gaston is not new to the Vatican, as he was a former official of the Pontifical Council for the Family from 2002 to 2007.
Born in 1965 and a native of Silay City, he finished a degree in Zoology at the University of the Philippines before deciding to become a priest.
Gaston was ordained priest at the Vatican by Pope John Paul II in 1993 and served as assistant priest in Mandaluyong City’s San Roque Parish as his first assignment.
He was sent in 1988 by the late Jaime Cardinal Sin to the University of Navarre in Spain for his seminary formation.
In 1997, he also obtained his doctorate in Sacred Theology at the Angelicum in Rome, and in the same year did a short Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program in Bioethics at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston, USA. (PNA)
scs/FGP/utb