The parish, “one of the most ancient structures of Western society”, endures as the “laboratory of the faith of youth today”: so said Cardinal James Francis Stafford, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, in the homily he gave during the mass that opened the fourth day of the 10th Symposium of European bishops on 27 April. Its origins dating back to the 3rd century, “the parish said the cardinal has suffered the harshest attacks in its millennarial history during the last hundred years, due to such phenomena as urbanization, industrialization and secularization”. Today, in spite of the difficulties that the parishes are encountering in the big cities, the cardinal added, “the vast majority of youth celebrate the Eucharist in their parishes, and it is in the parish that they learn that they are the people of God “. Stafford also threw light on “the two basic methods of the laboratory of faith of the early Church, which complement each other: the one is used for the multitude, the other for the few”. This dual role may still today be played in the parish, whose evangelization and pastoral structures reach both the people of the faithful and the “small groups where leaders are formed”. The world he concluded “still has a need for the witness of young lay confessors of the faith” and it is in the parishes that the opportunities for forming them exist. In this regard he recalled figures like the Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, don Primo Mazzolari and Fr. Giulio Bevilacqua.
