Five days, not just a memory” “

The 10th Symposium of European bishops on ‘Youth of Europe in the process of change. Laboratory of faith’ (cf. SirEurope nos. 16-17 of 24 and 30 April 2002) was held in Rome in April last year. Invited to attend the meeting were not only 34 young delegates representing all the European Episcopal Conferences, but also 10 young journalists of various nationalities (German, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Belgian, Turkish, Dutch and Italian). “The being side by side for five days – wrote a year after Gigliola Alfaro, one of the Italian journalists present – enabled us to understand how the youth of other countries experience the faith, what are their problems, and what are their efforts and enthusiasms to overcome them. It would be useful to meet each other again in a year’s time to discover if and how things have changed”. Here are the comments of her Dutch, Turkish and Portuguese colleagues. “Increasingly in Holland – says Joost Goes, free-lance journalist in church information – relations between youth and their bishops are growing, in the perspective suggested by the final message of the Symposium: that of ‘evangelizing the young and being evangelized by them’. The bishops are actively seeking occasions to meet with the young for a reciprocal, open and respectful exchange. Cardinal Simonis, archbishop of Utrecht, for example, invites the young to his home several times a year. Together they celebrate Mass in his private chapel and, in a family atmosphere, drink coffee together and discuss some issue of the day, to which the Cardinal and the youth contribute with their own experience of faith. These are moment of genuine ‘laboratory of faith’, of catechesis and of attentive listening to each other. In each diocese, moreover, the bishops are promoting and personally assuming responsibility for youth pastoral care which is increasingly being based at the diocesan level. Undoubtedly there are various parishes with a visible presence of youth in Holland, but since the young have become few in number in many of them, the need is posed to promote the meeting between the young at the diocesan and national level. With the title ‘Duc in altum’, moreover, the Bishops’ Conference has begun a three-year course for volunteers in youth pastoral work which will begin in September 2003”. “Last December – explains Aylin Meryem Kiziler, of the press office of the Turkish Bishops’ Conference – the Catholic Church held the final session of the ecclesial Assembly which brought together the various Catholic rites in Turkey. Catholic youth were represented through a special youth commission and were very happy about this, as they had not been invited to the first session in November 2001”. “The commission of Catholic youth – continues Aylin Kiziler – expressed to the Assembly its own wishes which especially concern the development of the dialogue between youth groups and the Churches through the annual meeting with the bishops and their representatives. Young people, moreover, have asked for the support of the Catholic Church to increase communication in the youth world, organize a forum through the Internet, in which to exchange views and information on various issues, plan joint activities and create an information centre for the young without differences between the various rites and communities. They also emphasized the importance of providing courses of formation in religion and social doctrine for the young and being able to organize pilgrimages that may permit young Christians in Turkey to meet each other”. “One of the results of last year’s Symposium – says Paulo Rocha, of the press office of the Portuguese Bishops’ Conference – was the publication in November 2002 of a document by the Bishops’ Conference on the ‘Foundations of youth pastoral care in Portugal’, in which the bishops make recommendations about how the youth ministry should be approached. The document is now being examined and discussed at diocesan and national youth meetings”. “A further project that emerged from this publication and that includes the conclusions of last year’s Symposium – added Rocha – is that of a ‘national plan of formation for the young’; a work group is devoting itself to its formulation”.