No one forgets how important youth ministry is for the renewal of the Church and the transformation of society. It is a very important dimension of our Piarist ministry, which has become increasingly important in the Order, as reflected in the Road Map of the six-year period and the importance it gives to accompanying young people and especially to the evangelising proposal of the Calasanz Movement.
This youth ministry cannot simply be a mobilisation of young people for unrelated activities, only to lose them without having made with them a real journey of human growth and spiritual discernment to help them define a life project in line with the Gospel to be lived in community. A pastoral ministry that is truly a place of growth in Christian and Calasanctian vocation needs committed and trained pastoral workers.
Therefore, with the beginning of the 23-24 school year, the Youth Pastoral Network has already introduced a new training offer for our pastoral workers and for all interested people in the Church in Spain and America. Always in an online format, six short workshops and three longer courses are offered. The aim of this offer is to address fundamental questions of youth ministry and to open spaces for formation, reflection and analysis, uniting the richness of participants from Spain and from many Latin American countries. The experience we have had so far with the Course for Animators of Pastoral Processes with young people, which will soon enter its third edition, encourages us to live the conviction that youth ministry must adapt to new times in order to offer the Good News with joy to the new generations. In addition to this course, which runs throughout the school year, there are two other courses of different lengths. One is Pastoral Care with Young People, of shorter duration and without face-to-face sessions. The other is Biblical Theology for Young People, for which the first of the six planned modules has already been structured. This first module will consist of six sessions taking place in the months of October to December, with the participation of different teachers from the Piarist Fathers and Marist experts.
In addition to these three courses, which will have a certain importance in terms of hours, smaller workshops will also be offered, which will focus on specific and essential aspects of youth ministry. For example, topics such as accompaniment, vocational culture, interiority and prayer, digital evangelisation, affective maturity and emotional education, as well as the development of the youth pastoral project will be presented.
In addition to these courses and workshops, the RPJ training website provides each pastoral team with a diagnostic tool that offers criteria and basic elements for youth pastoral development. It is a digital test that we recommend completing as a team and that can help discover the strengths and weaknesses of our work in youth ministry.
Red Pastoral Juvenil is growing day by day with content adapted to our times and with proposals that help us accompany our young people. Red Pastoral Juvenil already involves people from different Piarist provinces and also other religious institutions who, like us, love young people and want to build the Kingdom of God with them. Salesians, La Salle, Adsis, Catholic Action, etc… share with us some of these proposals that illuminate the work of so many pastoral actors. You are invited, as a Piarist, religious or lay person, to participate actively in this network. You can do this from now on by sharing and spreading the formative proposal for Course 23-24, and of course you can invite your team in the Presence or your whole Province to participate more actively in the different areas of the RPJ.
