City-in front

It is the stimulating theme-itinerary of the 70^o congress of the Italian Catholic University Federation.
We read from their invitation: "While the anguish for the pandemic seems to be giving way to the anguish of war, the Hope that is proper to us cannot fail to be renewed because we are young but, above all, because we are Christians. To this hope we add the hopes linked to the federative paths of recent years: the rethinking process that, step by step, is preparing us for the General States of Fiesole, the tensions for the new formative proposal, the beginning of a path of political training common to all the acronyms of European Catholic students. In this context and filled with these sentiments, we come to the Congress, to verify the City-before path. Work for the good of the city: time aimed at understanding and deepening urban systems, from its structures to its inhabitants, in order to develop a concept of citizenship that can make us feel, truly, the direct responsibility for what happens in our city. We want to do this by focusing on the suburbs: not the urban suburbs located in circumstantial and easily recognizable places but on the existential suburbs that are the most difficult to identify because, often, intimate conditions little known - in the first instance - even by those who live them and that the Lord also clearly indicates to us in the Gospel, trusting us that "every time you did these things to one of these least of my brothers, you did it to me" (Mt 25:40). In trying to know all those conditions we will focus on those that directly affect us and our peers. Youth, today, on the other hand, is a complex existential periphery, made up of many sufferings: uncertainty of the future, difficulties related to study, unemployment, indifference, addictions and we could continue for many other lines ".

I am very honored to have been invited to their congress. It seems to me that they want to go straight to identifying prospects for a future with the person at the center without rhetoric. Among other things, I carry with me a concern linked to the fact that in Italy there are more and more cases of people with regular jobs who become poor: an important challenge entrusted to the industrious hands of these future managers and leaders in politics and in the world. entrepreneurial to innovate and change trends. Otherwise the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and community welfare remains an illusion.


Gianfranco Cattai
NP May 2022