The Pope to the Italian bishops

Education
Contributions from
an Experience
Traces asked adults and young people–from Italy to Chile, from Kazakistan to the United States, from France to Sierra Leone–to evaluate themselves in light of Benedict XVI’s words. Here are their witnesses. From an experience born fifty years ago, a contribution that responds to the educational challenge to which the Pope commits the entire Church.

The youth–as John Paul II repeatedly affirmed–are the hope of the Church. However, in today’s world they are particularly exposed to the danger of being “tossed about by the waves and carried here and there by every wind of doctrine”(as St. Paul says in the Letter to the Ephesians, Eph 4:14). They therefore need to be helped to grow and to mature in faith: this is the first service they must receive from the Church, and especially from us bishops and from our priests. We must give them to understand that faith is not something we add to the burden of life, but is the pearl that must be discovered, thus the great gift to which they have a right. It is our duty to help them to know this pearl and find the preciousness of the faith that opens us to the light of God. We well know that many of them are unable, in today’s cultural circumstances, to understand and to quickly welcome all the Church’s teachings; therefore, precisely for this reason it is important to reawaken in them the intention to believe with the Church, even if they cannot–in a manner of speaking–digest everything at the outset, but to believe with the Church, entrust themselves to the Church, give credence to this Church, animated and guided by the Spirit, who is the true subject of faith, into which we enter and participate in the communion of faith.
Even if one does not personally understand everything, he enters into communion with the Church, wants to believe with the Church, and thus he is on the road with the Church, with the Lord Himself. In order for this to happen, young people must feel that they are loved by the Church, loved concretely by us bishops and priests. In this way, they will be able to experience, within the Church, the friendship and love the Lord has for them; they will understand that in Christ, truth coincides with love, and they will learn in their own time to love the Lord and to have faith in His body, which is the Church. Today, dear brother Italian bishops, this is the central point of the great challenge of the transmission of the faith to the young generation.
Benedict XVI
Conference with the participants of the General Assembly of the Italian Episcopal Conference. Rome, Room of the Synod, May 30, 2005.

FR. MARCO PAGANI, missionary, Cameroon
How wonderful the Pope’s words are! First of all because I’m no different from the kids we meet every day in Cameroon. We have the same desire in our hearts: to meet One who loves us. The only difference between me and them is that I met Him, for real, meeting CL. And my friends from that time, rightfully so, didn’t test me on doctrine. They welcomed me, gratuitously. I always thought that the way they looked at me must have been the way Jesus looked at His friends. Today, for me, a missionary priest, the memory of my encounter with Christ gives form to my way of being with kids in the parish where I work, with the kids I meet on the street, and with the kids at school. And it’s true that the transmission of faith necessarily passes through the encounter with me. It is an encounter that has all of the characteristics of a human encounter, because it is within the desire of the heart that one can find his fulfillment, otherwise Jesus is as abstract as a Martian! What a responsibility is asked of me! If the Mystery passes through my person, I can’t “act” like it’s something I acquired. I need to live from Him. And thus we’re together in this, because I’m not an “expert” on religion, but somebody who desires happiness, like them.

Holly Peterson, teacher, California
Many times, Fr. Giussani reminded us that we Christians living in the United States are like St. Peter when he went to Rome–announcing the faith for the first time. As a teacher working in a Catholic high school, Giussani’s words are a daily help. The skepticism in front of the faith or, worse yet, indifference towards Christianity, is a great paradox compared to the newness being born in the lives of some of the kids who have met our charism. Patrick, one of the Oregon GS kids who daily struggles with the difference between himself and the kids in his high school, wrote me after our vacation this summer where the theme was “I love Christ because I love life”: “I have stopped trying to ‘overcome’ life, but recognize the desire for the Infinite in my desires and in the desires that my friends have when drugs, sex, and alcohol come into discussion in the cafeteria. They really want what I want.” The Pope said, “We need to help them to see that the faith isn’t something added to their life, but is the pearl that one needs to discover.” The proposal of our companionship and charism, which Giussani brought into the world, is the path through which many kids in California are meeting the Church.

CLARA BROGGI AND GIOVANNI ORLANDO,
teachers, Kampala (Uganda)
Uganda’s reality is very different from that of Italy, yet even here that personal inconsistency the Pope refers to–and that leaves everyone, young and old, at the mercy of circumstances–is evident. Here, existence is accepted with serenity even when it’s difficult and dramatic, but kids are not capable of confronting the difficulty head on, of judging what happens, of suffering for their own convictions. Thus, they change religions with extreme ease, vote for one candidate rather than another according to the most trivial convenience, follow dreams of riches and social rescue, but are incapable of carrying out a gesture of authentic creativity, fighting for an ideal, or desiring something that gives meaning to life, to their affections, to their existence. In front of this situation, the great task of education relaunched by the Pope is addressed to us as well: young people must be helped to grow and mature in faith, feeling they’re loved. We think that this has to do with the love with which Fr. Giussani always embraced us–the courage to look at the entire depth of his own desire and to shout that an answer exists, so much so that one can have an experience of it. The words of the Pope, therefore, provoke us first of all in our decision to live the only reality that is not afraid of the questions of our heart and that is the anticipation of their fulfillment. We believe that this is the love that can bring out, accompany, and sustain the path of those we meet. It is thus that a few days ago a young guy told our friend Martin: “I’m an agnostic because, in the Church, I’ve only found boring responses to the questions I have about life. But now that I see how you live faith, I’m starting to think that maybe it could also be interesting for me.”

FATHER GIUSEPPE BERTON,
missionary, Sierra Leone
The Pope’s discussion on the education of youth, an education that is identified with putting yourself together with them on the road, evoked a lot of memories that were a little mixed in my mind with what I had read and meditated on in a book by the then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Faith, Truth and Tolerance, and with what Monsignor Giussani writes in his The Risk of Education. Ratzinger: “Christian faith is not a system… It is a path, and a path is recognized only by turning straight onto it and walking it.” “The path, the only Path…,” Monsignor Giussani would have echoed. This is just like the reminder of the difficulties, recalled by the Pope, that kids run up against, and the need to belong to the Church in its diverse expressions and presences, which can be a movement, for instance–these things are present in the writings of one or the other of them.
Since all of these things are happening in the environment in which I live, here in Sierra Leone, during the slow reconstruction of a country that has had a hard time getting back on its feet, I find myself in front of masses of young people lacking role models to imitate. Around two o’clock in the afternoon, Freetown is invaded by splashes of color from the different uniforms of the school kids returning home… home… and their fathers? … and their mothers? Where are they? It’s useless for me to try to find an answer; for the most part, the kids are lacking guides. The Church should be the alternative, but the task is disproportionate even to the presence of the Church. Yet these young people need to be accompanied. This is what we’re trying to do in the “Family Homes Movement,” taking our inspiration from the writings of Msgr. Giussani, so consonant with the thinking of the Pope. We try to let them experience, in staying together, “the friendship and the love the Lord has for them,”… so that “they will understand that in Christ, the truth coincides with love and they will learn in their own time to love the Lord and to have faith in His body, which is the Church.” We’ve been walking with them for awhile and the path seems long and tortuous, not only because of a lot of intercultural factors, but especially due to the weighty legacy of ten years of war that destroyed the whole social fabric. It is “the preciousness of faith that opens us to the light of God” that gives us hope and makes us exercise the charity of living together that isn’t always easy. It is the theological virtues that make possible the vision of a better world and that sustain our perseverance in reaching it. We’ll make it, even if everything isn’t understandable not only to the young, but also to us despite a patrimony of faith we carry on our shoulders, even to us who should have already walked much of the path. For now, we’re not lacking courage, even if I don’t know whether it’s really we who encourage the youth or the youth, with that spark of enthusiasm that animates them, who encourage us.

LYUBOV KHON, teacher, Kazakistan
How can young people today, who live in an atmosphere of nihilism and skepticism, meet Jesus and live a true religious life, immersing themselves more and more in reality? How can they live a unity with the Church, sharing all of their lives with the Christian companionship? These questions face me each time that, looking around, I realize the enormous lie of the State and the common mentality’s influence on the young, which brings ideals into the person that destroy him. It’s enough to have a sophisticated cell phone, a foreign brand, a high salary, and you’re happy. Many of our friends who met the Movement when they were still in school, through priests who came to Kazakhstan 8-10 years ago, have now begun to work. This time is full of new risks for them. On the one hand, the power seeks to “diminish the personality,” as Fr. Giussani wrote, and on the other hand, the desire for the infinite grows weak beneath the impetus of everyday desires. And we, with a wound and with a prayer in our hearts, see how someone, falling into forgetfulness, goes away from the community, choosing another path for himself, shutting off Desire with surrogate ones. Only the fundamental need for truth, happiness, justice, and love conquer all of these dangers the young go through; the “richness of the poor” conquers the kingdom of the lie. In order for young people to live this lack, this need, this thirst for God in a manner that is full of awareness, “they must experience that the Church loves them, that they are loved,” says Benedict XVI. This is the only true method of any education. From this is born an understanding of the fact that we adults must first of all be totally involved in the companionship that offered us the possibility to live an authentic encounter, and, in the belonging to the Christian companionship, to live every circumstance, without censuring any of them, with the judgment of faith, in order to witness to the young a fuller and more human way of living reality. We ourselves must be attached to the companionship in order to launch a provocation to the young, a provocation full of paternal love, certainty, and truth, which generates in them the new mentality of faith.

SILVIO GUERRA, teacher, Paris
The kids I meet are hardly “tossed around” but rather “dispersed” by the waves–and, in addition, with a “schizophrenic” experience of the Church. In fact, if they have met it, it was at baptisms, weddings, or funerals. Two phrases in Benedict XVI’s discussion provoked me: “to believe in the Church” and “to feel oneself concretely loved.” These challenges judge how I am in relation with them as a teacher, because the Church makes itself met through me. When these youths enter the classroom, they expect–in the best case scenario–to hear about definite articles, articulated prepositions, and irregular verbs. When I enter the classroom, I have before my eyes, first of all, a fact: we have the same Destiny. They as students, I as a teacher, we are destined–called–to become someone, to discover something, during Italian class. This “fascination” begins with how they learn and with how I teach. I have a passion for teaching not just a language, but my culture and therefore my history. Yet, for a kid of today to learn a foreign language is one of the most abstract things that exists. What does the vocabulary they hear remind them of? So, for example, I try to “activate” their experience around the words; I go looking for visual documents, images, or for some grammar lessons. I use recipes and words that have to do with Italian cuisine–because having a destiny is not an abstract thing; rather, in my experience it coincides with the faces I’ve encountered. Through what I do, I desire them to be able to meet a reality, the Church, through which they can love their Destiny–life.
The other day, I asked a kid, who for awhile had been provoking me during class, why his attitude had changed, because he was no longer interested in Italian the way he had been. He answered, “When I have your class, I feel obligated to love Italian. I, instead, don’t want to.” This, for me, is the answer to the “great challenge”: to challenge and provoke their freedom, so that comes into play and into class.

Bolivar Aguayo, teacher, Santiago, Chile
“Young people need to be helped to grow and to mature in the faith.” This seems to me to be the clearest challenge that questions the lives of all who deal with young people, because by now the dominant mentality infuses in them a feeling of futility toward what is proposed to them. At 15 they are already “too old” to learn mathematics, English, physics… If then on top of this a difficult family situation is added … they convince themselves that they don’t measure up to the expectations of this society and so they fall prey to any particular whatsoever, or they entrust themselves to “alternative cultures” that help them escape reality because, when you look it in the face, reality is scary. And faith more or less slides along the same logic.
Instead, as Mounier says, “At twenty years old, with our disappointments, not everything need be lost.” There needs to be someone–an adult–who can support young people in the positivity of the present and who, step by step, discovers along with them the meaning of things, the meaning that dictates the urgency of their hearts which want to learn and to love things that are certain and true, not fantasies… from mathematics to one’s girlfriend, from the struggle against injustice to the struggle to affirm beauty, learning together to fight for their needs by looking at the true reason that surpasses every human shortcoming and limit: “the pearl of the faith” as the Pope says. They need to see reason that coincides with a Presence, that becomes the sweetness of the empty day, not because it answers to the ideology of “willpower,” but because it is the answer to me, as the song says: “Sou feliz Senhor porque tu vais conmigo” [“I am happy, Lord, because you go with me”]…Out of this tension springs a history that fills young people’s studies and adults’ work, that fills life.

Cinetta Dantrassi, teacher, Rome
“Faith is not something that we add to the burden of life but it is something that has to be discovered.” The aim of my work is to verify and discover life’s great possibility: the plea for meaning that the students and I are has an answer that is present. In the neighborhood of Rome where I work, it happens that those who meet me, because of the experience I carry, find themselves discovering a strange connection between the normal things of life–studies, friendship, free time–and destiny, the meaning of life. This happens when I am teaching, and the classrooms light up with questions and issues that also help me to better understand what I live and carry with me. But this would be just a fascinating intellectual game, which would easily fall victim to disillusionment in the face of the inability keep up the impetus for good even when it is recognized, if the fact that “truth coincides with love” did not come into play. You can love the destiny of the other and accept the risk of his freedom (without allowing yourself to be cheated by measuring his answer) if there is an unconditional love in your own experience, if the meaning of life is not a theory but One who is present. I have seen dozens of faces, even in situations of drugs or human breakdown, that, throughout these years, have encountered in this daily challenge to their freedom a look full of appreciation and passion that has engaged them.

Pietro Silanos, university student, Milan
The Holy Father’s urgency toward young people, which he expressed in Bari at the conclusion of the Eucharistic Congress, demonstrates a passion for education that is lived and witnessed with great courage. What struck me is the Pope’s historical intelligence. He reads the drama of the times we live in with extreme realism. Even in the university environment, where we spend most of our days, we are often “tossed about by the waves” of a mentality that systematically proposes nothingness. We do not feel invulnerable to “winds of doctrine” championed by the cultural intelligentsia populating our institutions of higher learning. In such a difficult climate, the presence of people involved in that great adventure called “education”–the introduction of each “I” to the discovery of total reality–seems ever more crucial. Without “I”s that are aware of their own human stature, there is, in fact, no possibility of building something secure and lasting. Where do we start, then? My experience, like that of many like me, shows that there is a place where this adventure is continually assured and supported: the relationship with Christ present in the companionship generated by Him, the Church. “Christ is really present among us,” Benedict XVI said in Bari. The encounter with Msgr. Giussani and with the Movement has been and continues to be the event of this discovery. For this reason, we feel, along with the Pope, like cooperators Veritatis [cooperators of Truth].

Stefano, high school student, Bologna, Italy
My name is Stefano and I am in my last year at the Righi science high school in Bologna. Since middle school, I have always had a great aversion to Christianity and to the Catholic Church in particular. In fact, until high school, my life was mainly defined by my one passion: playing soccer. In class with me there was a boy who always got angry when I blasphemed. I got along with him, but I did not understand why he insisted on nagging me and always inviting me to meetings and to do School of Community. For two years, I repeatedly turned down every invitation. At Easter, this boy also invited me to play soccer, to which I gladly went and there I met other friends of his. There was one thing that struck me about them: you could see that their way of being together was different, that they were different and seemed happy. Anyway, my attention to this was superficial and I led my life as before. Once, before soccer, there was a meeting and they convinced me to go. I decided I would put up with a half hour of boredom and then I would get to play. In that half hour, though, those boys spoke in a way that was real. I had always seen Christianity as something abstract, only for losers. There, instead, my idea of Christianity was cancelled out by the objectivity with which they spoke. There I was struck, but I still had no idea of what had happened. You could tell that they were friends, though, and to have friends like that was what I wanted. So I began to spend time with them, first on Saturday nights, then at School of Community, and I never wanted to be separated from those people. And I liked School of Community. Through Fr. Giussani’s books, we had discussions, and I learned to use reason differently. Everything was different and, miraculously, my life has begun to have an order. At a certain point, I rediscovered myself as a Christian, and the Church, the thing I perhaps most scorned, was helping me to get closer to the words of Christ, words I struggled to use. In my fourth year of high school I was baptized, and now I can affirm without being embarrassed that the Church is the path to Christ.

Elena Ugolini, principal, Bologna
The first time I entered a classroom as a teacher I was 24. I found before me 30 students who were waiting for “the new Religion teacher.” Before entering that classroom, I prayed to Our Lady and asked her to help me start from what was already there, from their heart, which is the same as mine. While crossing that threshold, I had the certainty that they were my allies, that they were “immediately with me.” They were struck both when I asked them whether there was something common in each man and when they heard words such as “happiness,” “meaning,” “for ever”… That was the first time, in a religion class, that people had ever talked to them about these issues. They thought they already knew what Christianity is; they had already rejected it, without even having met it seriously. That dialogue continued through the experience of these years and made me understand that not only were those kids “with me” since the beginning, but also that they were there “for me.” It is through what the Lord operates in their humanity that I have the possibility to change, to become more certain, to experience that deep correspondence before His Presence. How can I separate Christ–the precious pearl of my life–from them? My relationship with them is the “demonstration” to me, it is the most evident place of the presence of the Lord, where He shows how much He loves me, through “human faces.” It is there, first and foremost, where I verify that faith is the keystone for each relationship, that faith explains, in the literal sense, everything: from the sadness of a 15-year-old kid, to Leopardi’s poetry, or a piece of news in the newspaper. The youth I met had the same experience as us adults. “I belonged to those three kids; I belonged not to them but rather to the unity among them,” said Fr. Giussani, while recounting the first day in which Gioventu’ Studentesca [GS–Student Youth] was born, at the Berchet High School in Milan. The Church is this unity, initially lived without awareness, but eventually searched for, desired, and served with the totality of one’s own existence.

Soledad de las Hazas, teacher, Madrid
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wondered whether a contemporary European man, a modern man, could actually believe in the divinity of Christ. In the same way we too can ask ourselves: “Can a youth of nowadays, a post-modern man, believe in Christ”? The originality of Christianity lies in the fact that it claims to be the “pearl,” the answer to the hidden need behind our desire for success in life, behind the anxious search for an affective relationship that could fill the desire to love and be loved–that which is behind the desire for justice for everybody and the good of your family, that life would not ultimately be sterile, or that the evil done or suffered would not be the last word. Our experience makes us recognize that the fact of discovering this pearl allows us to sell all we own, like our richness marked by hedonism and relativism, with which we claim to survive, but which does not allow us to bear the “hardships of life.” This is the task of the educator: to propose this pearl not as an ornament but rather as the most precious thing in life. The educator addresses the experience of youth in as much as they are men, human beings; he or she addresses their hearts. His or her proposal exalts their reason and freedom. What we have thought, heard, or said is not the point. What is needed are not exceptional moral or intellectual qualities; rather, only the courage to verify whether or not its claim corresponds to what their hearts desire. In front of that, the educator cannot forget two elementary certainties. The first one is the “starting point”: the pearl exists and we do not have to make it! The second certainty is that the heart also exists and we can recognize it! Without these two certainties, education to faith is already defeated and outdone. In the same way, one cannot cheat on the method, because one’s life, the destiny of humankind and of the very Church, is what is at stake. The Church cannot cheat with its proposal, it cannot simply give us a book with instructions and formulas to believe, because it is a living thing and as such it has to offer a companionship in the path of life. This is the same for youths, who cannot cheat either, because they cannot verify or decide without becoming one with the concrete “face” of the pearl they have met. If we are not willing to accompany and if the young people are not willing to let themselves be accompanied, it is evident that we are not on the right track, the only one that leads to Christ.

Claudio Risé, psycho-analyst, Milan
In my experience, young people of today are particularly vulnerable to the danger of being “tossed about by the waves and carried here and there” by any doctrine because their personal identity, as well as their self-awareness, is extremely weakened by phenomena typical of our cultural model: the weakening of families, the dissolution of environments of traditional belonging (such as the peasant or laborer culture, the neighborhood, the town or city), and a pervasive system of communication that is impersonal toward each of these ambits. The recent experience [in Italy] of the referendum about in vitro fertilization demonstrated to everybody the editorial power of lobbies interested in the development of the reproductive market, which upended every deontological ethic by manipulating information, statements, texts, people, and data. In front of this dissolution of identity, which leaves youth alone and prey to the media, only the experience of love proposed by Pope Benedict XVI can, in turn, reveal itself as victorious. The youth feel abandoned, and they have a vital need and desire to be loved. The Church can represent for them the new affective belonging, which can occupy the place left empty by all the previous abandonment and destruction. Yet this belonging cannot be a mere intellectual or social phenomenon, it cannot be a recreational or consolatory ambit. These lonely and basically abandoned young people need to encounter a human presence: the Presence of the Son who became a man. A Church which truly welcomes and guides is only this, a personal presence represented and multiplied in the community. Only this can soothe the extreme solitude of the soul of the youth of today and save them from the “tossing” operated by the media, the culture, and consumerism. It is a belonging which, through the encounter with the Son and the breath of the Spirit, can take them back to the Father from whom they have been orphaned.