Pope: Education should help young people find themselves and others

Pope Leo XIV tells participants in a Vatican conference on mental health, education, and digital technology that young people need help rediscovering silence, relationships, and openness to transcendence.

Pope Leo XIV meets with participants in the OEI – Holy See meeting (@Vatican Media)

Educating young people in the age of the digital revolution is one of the great challenges of our time, Pope Leo XIV said on Saturday, as he met with participants in the OEI – Holy See meeting “Maps of Hope for a Regional Educational Agenda: Mental Health, Digital Technologies and Education.”

The meeting brought together experts, academics, and ministers from Latin American countries. It was organized by the Dicastery for Culture and Education and the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, in collaboration with the Organization of Ibero-American States.

In his address, Pope Leo recalled his affection for Latin America and began with the image of traditional handcrafted textiles.

With their many threads and vivid colors, he said, these textiles show that “no single thread is enough to create the pattern.” Each thread and each color finds its meaning only “within a larger tapestry.”

Education as the art of weaving communion

The Pope said education is called to rediscover itself not as the construction of isolated individuals, but as “the art of weaving communion.”

Just as ancient peoples looked to the heavens to read the constellations, he said, people today are called to raise their gaze and build a “global educational constellation,” which should foster awareness that we all belong to one human family.

This perspective, Pope Leo noted, is essential when addressing the issue of mental health, which cannot be approached only from a clinical or technical standpoint.

Rather, he said, it means responding to “one of the greatest forms of poverty of our time: the loss of our inner bearings.”

Many young people, the Pope observed, have access to the most sophisticated tools, yet struggle to give meaning to their lives, hopes, loves, and even sufferings.

Such situations reveal forms of psychological vulnerability, especially in a world that pushes them toward performance and intense competition, generating anxiety, fear of failure, and disorientation.

Rediscovering the interior life

Pope Leo stressed that human beings can live fully and overcome inner fragility when they are able to find meaning.

“When a person discovers that his or her life has value, that he or she is loved, awaited, and called to a mission in the world, then hope is reborn,” he said.

Hope, he added, is not a naive illusion, but “a spiritual force that sustains life, even in the most difficult moments.”

For this reason, the Pope warned that it is not enough to connect young people to digital networks if they remain disconnected from themselves, from others, and from their inner life.

Young people, he said, need to be helped to rediscover silence, reflection, the ability to ask questions, the depth of relationships, and openness to transcendence.

Called to be a light

Returning to the image of many colored threads forming a single tapestry, Pope Leo invited public institutions, schools, universities, families, religious communities, and the worlds of culture and communication to work together.

In this time of digital transition, the Pope concluded, people are called to be a light, especially for young people.

What is needed, he said, are visions capable of building new cultural syntheses: visions that unite thought and life, contemplation and action, solidarity with the poorest and the search for meaning, while preserving the deeply human heritage of education.

Vatican News
Source: vaticannews.va/en