A pastoral year has ended and we are "gearing up" to plan "the new". Many experiences and above all beautiful relationships that have been built and that have marked the steps of the journey made with young university students.
Entering more and more into the reality of the University, we realize how important it is to personally meet, listen to and accompany young people, lived in a style of simplicity and gratuitousness. If on the one hand this knowledge opens us to a multiplicity of encounters, on the other hand it confronts us with the precariousness and the continuous fluctuation of young people who pass through our environments, stop in the meeting places prepared for them, but then maybe even leave. for other countries called to deepen their studies and perhaps enter the world of work.
The more we enter into this reality, the more we discover how much the university world is constantly changing and asking for courageous answers to today's cultural challenges.
The synodal journey, carried out by the Diocese of Rome, has also traced some interesting paths on which our attention goes. From the responses to the questionnaires by young people, some voices emerged that agree on the need to find "significant figures" in university environments who are real fathers and mothers to whom to ask meaningful questions. Young people want to be helped to understand their feelings and affections to understand "how much love is enough to form a family and have children and if it is worth getting married". There is also a widespread anxiety for the future, without however renouncing to build it "in honesty and care for creation". They ask the Church for adequate attention to culture to account for the faith and fight ignorance. They also want to be told about the seriousness of life and commitment in society. How can you not feel challenged?
From here the task of us educators emerges clearly: to help young people discover the value and meaning of study in relation to future choices and the good they are called to do through the knowledge received. In research and on the path towards these choices, they ask to be accompanied.
The various initiatives carried out this year as the Diocesan Office for University and Culture, are further making us reflect, together with Fr Andrea Lonardo, on the modalities of the proposals and on how to reach young people, especially those who come to the city of Rome not only from Italy but also from other countries and often look for a place that welcomes them and makes them feel at home. We are realizing that precisely this desire of theirs to feel at home is maturing in us how to take care of those who attend the parish study rooms, of those who look out into the university chapel of St. Augustine medicine, of those who attend the Eucharistic celebration of Sunday in San Tommaso More as a point of reference, but also as a place of sharing and fraternity with those who pass and frequent the parish rooms, the courtyard and the surrounding lawn.
Last but not least, the experience of the summer camp was the confirmation of what young university students are looking for, of how important it is for them to have a broad integration that arises from the concrete acceptance of their needs and the questions of meaning that they carry within. A personal accompaniment, which at times is not so explicit, is what they ask for or what they let their gestures shine through.
Our service expressed in a style of synodality is becoming increasingly clear; now yes, we have some more tools not to think but to act and go to meet them to make them visible and concrete: an evangelization that illuminates the new ways of relating to God, with others and with the environment and that arouses values fundamental. It is necessary to arrive where the new stories and paradigms are formed, to reach the deepest nuclei of the soul of the cities with the Word of Jesus. (EG, 74). And, in our case, the deepest nuclei of the university cities!
The Sisters of the Community of Rome University
