The Pope to young people: “It’s a good protest but one must also build”

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The Pope to young people: “It’s a good protest but one must also build”

For the fourth time, Francis goes to the “Scholas Occurrentes” headquarters in Rome to inaugurate various initiatives, including a training course in a monastery in Pistoia and a center for victims of cyberbullying in Milan. “Young people are not the future, they are the present”

Sister Ana drinks her mate while virtually talking with the Pope from the monastery of Pistoia of which she’s abbess and where, this afternoon, a training course for the educators of “Scholas Occurrentes”, the organization founded 20 years ago in Buenos Aires by Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio and that today is a Vatican Foundation based in Palazzo San Calisto in Rome, was inaugurated. It is there, in the Trastevere district, in the heart of the Eternal City, that the Pontiff goes for the fourth consecutive year to inaugurate and bless the international project “Programming for Peace” which, with the help of computer experts, aims to teach millions of young people to code and learn the use of new technologies with an ethical perspective.

But Francis, in video connection with Brazil, Panama, Romania, Italy, also “blesses” all the other different initiatives of dialogue, education, music, art, technology, that the foundation has launched this year aimed at involving young people – often poor and without opportunities – of the five continents. Among these, for example, the “Hub Tecnológico Scholas” in the new Panama headquarters, the project of two major meetings in 2020 with young people from the Balkans and Eastern Europe, or the “hogàr”, a safe place for victims of bullying and cyberbullying built inside a pediatric centre in Milan.

Among the various projects there is also the training center that will take place in the monastery of the Benedictines in Pistoia, which Sister Ana and the other religious, together with the young participants, present to the Pope while sitting on a green sofa next to Bishop Fausto Tardelli. “A sprout in the centre of Pistoia”, the abbess describes it. An expression that struck Bergoglio and to which he responds with a typically Argentinean expression: “It’s a joyita” (a small jewel, ed.). “I can’t say that José Maria (Del Corral, the president of “Scholas”) is a joyita,” he adds jokingly, playing on the ambiguity of the term that, in Latin American jargon, refers to people of bad reputation.

Amid the laughter and applause the ones present – those at San Calisto and those in hang-out – Pope Francis admits that he was strongly impressed by seeing in these projects “young and old people in dialogue”. “It is todays’ challenge” he says, because this dialogue does not always take place, “and the young lose their roots, their sense of history, their belonging, while the old feel marginalized and die sad. We need to establish this fruitful dialogue that prevents liquid and uprooted young people”.

As on other occasions, the Pope repeats the words of the prophet Joel: “Let the old dream and the young prophesy”. “The nun with the mate in her hand has a dream,” he adds. But also the young people – like the three students who tell him about their computer science studies or Maria Chiara, who works for the victims of cyberbullying – are realizing their dreams.

“Young people hope for initiatives like these. In various cities around the world they have taken to the streets to defend the environment, the earth. Young people have unimaginable power, they are creative, but most of the time they don’t have leaders to lead them. Leaders that lead them out, because they keep them under them,” says the Pope off the cuff and in Spanish. “Young people are not the future, we need to correct that expression. Young people are the now, the today. If we think that they are the future or that they are the “in the meantime” (the “mientras tanto”)… in the meantime they lose their strength, their dream, and they end up domesticated, indeed badly domesticated. Young people are the present, they must commit themselves now”.

And they must do so “positively, with creativity”, the Pope urges, as seen in the projects of Scholas Occurrentes, that no one initially believed could spread in 190 countries and in about 445 thousand schools and associated educational networks. “It’s okay to go out and protest for something, but we must also build, discover that we are capable. One may make mistakes a thousand and one times, but it is better to make mistakes by building than not make mistakes with one’s arms crossed”.

“Be brave, go forward, come out with courage,” is the Pope’s encouragement. That, at the conclusion of the meeting entitled “Dame de beber” (Give me drink), prays to God for those who “among us or outside do not feel thirsty. Give them thirst, Lord, and give them water so that they can quench their thirst”.

By Salvatore Cernuzio

Published on the Vatican Insider website