Two First Nations students in Rome as winners of the 2025 Francis Xavier Conaci Scholarship have shared their stories of family, culture and community at an event at the Australian Embassy to the Holy See. Source: Vatican News.
Every year, the Australian Catholic University (ACU) and the Australian embassy to the Holy See join forces through the Francis Xavier Conaci Scholarship to sponsor two First Nations students to study in Rome.
On Wednesday, this year’s recipients, Drew Campbell, a Wiradjuri woman, and Jacob Lasserre, a Kamilaroi man, both 19, shared their stories at a NAIDOC Week event at the embassy. This year’s theme is “The Next Generation: Strength, Vision & Legacy”.
The scholarship program is named after Francis Xavier Conaci, a 19th-century Aboriginal boy who travelled to Rome to train as a monk before dying tragically at a young age. He is believed to be buried in the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls.
The event was introduced by the Australian ambassador to the Holy See, Keith Pitt, who highlighted the importance of the scholarship and the opportunity to listen to the experiences of the young First Nation students. Representatives from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue and the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments were also present.
Both students are earning Bachelor’s degrees at the ACU’s Brisbane Campus. For Ms Campbell, who’s studying Speech Pathology, going to Rome on the scholarship was a chance to reconnect with her Aboriginal roots and culture, especially her grandmother’s story, as she was taken from her parents at eight years old and forced to live with a non-Indigenous family.
“What I am learning and experiencing here, all of this ties down to making her proud, essentially. And I think that’s one of the most important things in my heart,” she said, adding that she was inspired by the NAIDOC theme focusing on new generations of First Nation people.
For Mr Lasserre, who is undertaking a degree in Secondary Education, the cultural exchange he has experienced in Rome is what has impacted him the most.
“This opportunity to come to Rome to spread First Nations culture and bring it back to my community is an opportunity that I’ll never take for granted,” he said. “This represents not just a step in my journey, but a step for all First Nations people across Australia.”
Other speakers at the event included Caritas Australia’s chief executive officer Kirsten Sayers, who spoke of the organisation’s work with indigenous communities, and Katherine Aigner, who shared her experience of working with the Vatican Museums’ ethnographic section, “Anima Mundi – Peoples, Arts and Cultures,” in 2010 to reconnect indigenous collections and objects with the communities they originated from.
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First Nations Australian students in Rome enriched by cultural exchange (By Isabella H. de Carvalho and Grace Lathrop, Vatican News)
