Catholic Church - God is young: a conversation with Thomas Leoncini

W E WERE SITTING across from each other in a room on the ground floor of the Domus Sanctae Marthae when Pope Francis spoke those words. I remember the exact moment perfectly: His eyes were alight with a spark, as if, along with the words, he wanted to communicate something profound and liberating at the same time. We were in the middle of our fifth meeting for this book, and that sentence struck me with unusual force: as if, for a moment, the story was leaving my handseven as they meticulously recorded note after noteto go and shake a thousand other hands and reach a thousand other hearts.

With those memorable words, the pontiff was affirming that young people, or rather the great castoffs of our troubled times, are actually made in the same mold as God. That their best attributes are His. A God who is not only Fatherand Mother, as John Paul I earlier indicatedbut also Son, and for that reason Brother. Francis was claiming a central place for these castoffs. He was delivering them from the margins and characterizing them as the protagonists of the present and of the future. Of a common history.

If it is true that young people are constantly subjected to a consumer societyoverwhelmed by endless false starts that lead nowhere and constantly deluded by the promise of a social linearity that no longer existsthese pages spring from a desire to liberate them. The pontiff confirmed that the 2018 Synod on Young People is the ideal framework within which to understand and fully value their significance.

Francis has devoted much of his precious time to this project, and I have been merely the intermediary that the Pope chose to deliver his message, unfiltered, to young people throughout the world.

Young people are not the only castoffs of this consumer society; many adults are marginalized as well, especially the elderly, cut off by market-based logic and power principles.

It is necessary to find strength and determination, the pontiff says, but also tenderness, to create a bridge between young and old each and every day: Only by embracing the young and old can society truly be renewed, for the benefit of all who have been left behind and toward whom our gazes must constantly be directed.

Courage and wisdom are the essential ingredients of this much-needed revolution of tenderness.

T . L .

Pope Francis, I would like to start by asking you: What is youth?

Y OUTH DOES NOT exist. When we talk about youth, we are often unconsciously referring to myths about youth. I like to think that youth does not exist, only young people. Just as old age does not exist, but old people do. And when I say old people I dont mean it as a bad word, on the contrary: Its a very beautiful word. We must be joyful and proud of being old, just as we are normally proud of being young. Old age is a privilege: It means having experience, being able to know and recognize our faults and our merits; it means the ability to be potentially renewed, just as when we were young; it means having acquired the understanding necessary to accept the past and, above all, to have learned from the past. Often we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the culture of the adjective, without the substantiation of a noun. Youth, of course, is a noun, but it is a noun without any real substance; it is an idea that remains the orphan of a fanciful concept.

What do you see when you think of a young person?

I SEE SOMEONE who is searching for his own path, who wants to fly on his two feet, who faces the world and looks out at the horizon with eyes full of the future, full of hope as well as illusions. A young person stands on two feet as adults do, but unlike the adults whose feet are parallel, he always has one foot forward, ready to set out, to spring ahead. Always racing onward. To talk about young people is to talk about promise and to talk about joy. Young people have so much strength; they are able to look ahead with hope. A young person is a promise of life that implies a certain degree of tenacity; he is foolish enough to delude himself and resilient enough to recover from that delusion.

Then, too, we cant talk about young people without touching on the theme of adolescence, because we must never underestimate that phase of life, which is probably the most difficult and the most important in a persons years. Adolescence marks the first true conscious contact with identity and represents a transitional phase not only in the childs life, but the life of the entire family. It is an intermediate phase, like a bridge that leads to the other side. And for this reason adolescents are neither here nor there, they are on their way, on the road, on the move. They are not childrennor do they want to be treated as suchbut they are not adults, either. Yet they want to be treated as adults, especially when it comes to privileges. So we can probably say that adolescence is a state of inevitable tension, an introspective tension of the young. At the same time it is so intense that it is able to shake up the entire family, which is precisely what makes it so important. It is the young mans and the young womans first revolution, the first life transformation, the transformation that changes one so much that it often upends friendships, loves, daily life as well. When we are adolescents the word tomorrow cannot be used with certainty. Even as adults we should be more cautious in uttering the word tomorrow, particularly these days, but never are we as aware of the