On my recent trip to Bolivia, I met with the Provincial Ministers of the Bolivarian Franciscan Conference with the General Definitory and then I was able to visit the Missionary Province of St. Anthony in Bolivia.
This country is experiencing different phenomena: social and political instability, which undermines real democracy; widespread poverty and social inequalities, among the first on the continent; barriers to access to education; lack of water and deforestation, consequences of climate change, unregulated extraction of minerals; difficulties in families; internal migration to urban centres, with the consequences of poverty and social exclusion; flight of young people from rural areas and migration abroad; influence on drug trafficking policy; forms of secularization, the presence of other Christian groups and sects, the search for and recovery of pre-colonial cultures and religions, also to deal with Christianity in the form received.
The biggest challenge to give hope to the country remains that of young people, who see their future compromised. Young people are the poorest and leave their land as migrants. This is a face of today's widespread poverty, which we cannot ignore.
To become pilgrims of hope means to take to heart the condition of young people and their future, to open paths of access to education, to offer them a toolbox endowed with solid values for the elaboration of their human, religious and civil identity, so that they can live legally and build a dignified future. Democracy and social, political and even Christian community change can start first of all from them.
On the South American continent, as in many other areas of the world, it is urgent to return to caring for young people and opening up opportunities for them to become pilgrims of hope for a better future. This reality is also a very strong appeal to us, in the world. The future starts again with young people and we do not want to leave them alone. For this reason, it is urgent to make concrete choices to know, meet and promote the condition of young people.
Part of this choice is also the promotion of a more organic, prepared and well-animated youth ministry, together with the young people themselves, who can become protagonists. All this also draws the context for a pastoral care of vocations, which is new in vision, methods and mediations. Animated with the laity and not only by us. Is it not precisely in these conditions, most of the time difficult, that the Lord continues to call to the evangelical life and to the mission? I see that amongst us there is too little sensitivity to vocations and shared responsibility for them, never to be delegated, except to animators.
Adults who distance themselves from young people and from the courage to offer them a beautiful and good life, even that of the Friars Minor in the footsteps of Christ with Francis, they are adults who have lost the compass of hope, they do not have the audacity to cross the wide sea of this time and are content to remain along the coast of consolidated habits, without taking risks.
This is only how you survive, there is no future. What do we choose?
