by Angelo Forti

When this publication arrives in the homes of the members of the Pious Union of Saint Joseph, like the primitive community in the Cenacle, the Church is summoned to the Synod to "be reborn... by the young and with the young". This perspective is always necessary to avoid the risk of covering the lights of dawn with the colors of the sunset.

It is said that when an old man dies, a library disappears. We cannot deny that when the elderly who do not close themselves in a resentful trench but remain open to daily life have a precious capital of wisdom to donate and thus offer the coordinates of an agile life path. Young people, in fact, offer society and the Church "virgin" soil, the freshness of novelties, the ability to dream of the future, the intuition to grasp "the seeds of the Word" that divine grace has sown in history and which now even in a complex and difficult current situation makes it germinate and bear fruit. 

For this reason, the Synod dedicated to young people opens up on three branches: "Young people, faith and vocation". The young people, already interviewed, responded in 221 thousand. From the Solemnity of Saint Joseph, 19 March, to the 24th, the eve of Easter, 300 young people from the five continents gathered in Rome and asked the Church questions about themselves, about the practice of faith and about the meaning to give to their lives.

“Young people, faith and the meaning of life” are perennial questions, but today they need answers that are open to the supernatural, to the range of questions that progress, technology, society and educational methodologies present on the stage of life. The grammar, which the different generations are called to write on the musical score of the dialogue. Today everything is built on saying and listening, between silence and a word, phrases and gestures that open up the relationship. A teacher is good when he is able to offer wise answers to intelligent questions. The desire to ask is the construction site of life. We have all grown in proportion to how many "whys" we have addressed to mum and dad, to our teachers, to our spiritual father and to our conscience.

The synod of bishops with young people will not be similar to a college of teachers to give an opinion on conduct and participation in learning, but a gym in which we learn to know ourselves and accompany us along the paths of individual lives, building a platform of values ​​on which to converge to stipulate an educational pact with oneself. 

When faced with important news, we are sometimes paralyzed by fear: our experience, often accompanied by a lack of authentic faith, imprisons a beneficial wind that would like to carry us out to sea.

History, which we have always called "teacher of life", teaches us that the great founders who had the task of writing luminous centuries of history were all young.

The first that comes to mind is Saint Francis of Assisi, followed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, these had been preceded by Saint Augustine. Saint Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles, was not old and the divine Spirit used his ardor as a convert to expand the Gospel in the world.

The list of saints includes a gallery of daring young people who obeyed their vocation and marked the paths of history with milestones.

Today, we cannot hide that we live in a "secularized" reality, in a climate of moral and religious indifference: whether God exists or not is no longer of interest. Pope Francis in his exhortation Evangelii Gaudium writes that in people's lives the most important things are captured only «from the external, from the immediate, fast, superficial, provisional. The real gives way to appearance." 

Religious life also enters this circuit. -Pope Francis continues to say that this embrace "tends to reduce faith and the Church to the private and intimate sphere... as to a progressive relativism, giving rise to a generalized disorientation".

Young people, with the Synod dedicated to them, are called to be protagonists, to be winemakers who know how to produce good wine as well as provide new wineskins - that is - "renewed souls", to make the joy of men and women invited to the wedding of Jesus with humanity.