The way out of the crisis in which we find ourselves -a cultural and spiritual crisis, no less than the economic one- will not be possible without improving the quality of the Education. And educating is not just another official document . It is one of those tasks that we say require a "vocation". And like any vocation, this also carries with it a mission statement, impossible without what has been called "educational passion".

It is worthwhile, in our status, to deepen this "educational passion", an expression that was used on May 27, 2010 by Benedict XVI, in a meeting with the Italian bishops where he explained how, in our current educational urgency, he saw especially two roots:

a) First, a false concept of man's autonomy. He described it as follows: "Man should develop by himself alone, without impositions from others, who could attend to his self-development, but not enter into this process". And he warned, resorting to the personalist perspective: "In reality, it is essential for the human person the fact that he becomes himself only from the other, the 'I' becomes himself only from the 'you' and from the 'you', he is created for dialogue, for synchronic and diachronic communion. And only the meeting with the 'you' and with the 'we' opens the 'I' to itself". For this reason, he concluded, it is necessary "to overcome this false idea of man's autonomy, as an 'I' complete in himself, while he becomes 'I' also in the collective meeting with the 'you' and with the 'we'".

b) Second, skepticism and relativism. In other words, the exclusion of the sources that guide the human path: nature (the "book of creation", capable of providing us with orientations on true values); Revelation (as source not only of motivations, but also capable of helping us to decipher the book of creation); and history (which is not only result of decisions, but educator, in its cultural and religious dimensions, of that openness of the "I" to the "you", to the "we" and to the "You" of God, even if in some aspects the bequest of history should be improved.

The now Pope Emeritus exhorted us to return to the sources of the Education, and not to give in to difficulties, to the temptations of distrust and resignation, in the pejorative sense of the term.

Let us rather awaken," he proposed, "in our communities that educational passion, which is a passion of the "I" for the "you", for the "we", for God, and which is not resolved in a didactic, in a set of techniques or even in the transmission of arid principles. To educate is to form the new generations, so that they know how to enter into a relationship with the world, strong in a meaningful report that is not only occasional, but augmented by the language of God that we find in nature and in Revelation, by a shared interior patrimony, by the true wisdom that, while recognizing the transcendental end of life, orients thought, affections and judgment".

And he concluded by underlining some keys of the Christian Education : the importance of the advertisement of Jesus Christ for the integral training and for a successful life; the meeting staff with Him as "the core topic to intuit the relevance of God in daily existence"; the relevance of the educator's witness; the proposal, to young people, of a "high and transcendent measure of life, understood as a vocation". In short, the need for "a good and meaningful life" in its profound relationship with Education based on "the true sources of values".

In fact, it is clear that this educational passion is required at all stages of formation and in all subjects, perhaps particularly in the more "committed" ones such as ethics and Education in the faith.