We are approaching the end of the Year of Faith. Therefore, it is interesting to recapitulate what we can also use to educate in the faith.

Well, beauty is a decisive path, it always has been, for Education. And today we must rediscover it for Education in faith, which has its own beauty. If you want to build a ship," wrote A. De Saint-Exupéry, "do not gather men to cut wood, divide tasks and give orders, but teach them the nostalgia of the sea, vast and infinite". Along the same lines, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, today Pope Francis, said that to educate is "to maintain the capacity to dream" (Message to educational communities, 2007).

Indeed, as Dostoevsky states, "mankind can live without science, it can live without bread, but without beauty it could not go on living, because there would be nothing to do in the world. The whole secret is here, the whole story is here".

The Education in faith seeks to make Christians who are moved by social, cultural and apostolic ideals, capable of walking towards great horizons with small steps and of being accompanied by many other people. For this, beauty must make its way; for in a world without beauty, truth loses its brilliance and goodness exhausts its strength. On the contrary, a beauty separated from truth and good would become a superficial and merely subjective mask, if not individualistic. Although our contemporaries are not always open to the beauty that harmonizes with truth and goodness, they are desirous and nostalgic for that authentic beauty, not superficial and ephemeral (cf. Benedict XVI, Message to the Pontifical Academies, November 25, 2008).

Beauty, all authentic beauty, is a window that allows the transit towards the transcendent and absolute, the eternal and infinite. The contemplation of the beauty of the created world impels to go to meeting of its Creator. The contemplation of the beauty reflected in faith, worship, charity, is a way that leads to the submission to God and to the men with whom we are called to share it. Beauty financial aid to go out of oneself and go towards others, and thus discover God and the way in which He looks at them and cares for them.

Where to find beauty and how to show it? Beauty can be found in the world created by God, both in inanimate creatures and in living beings, with their many varieties, ranges and colors. In a particular way, beauty is found in the world of personal values, such as fidelity, courage, the capacity to give oneself. When we think of a person capable of sacrificing himself for the full life of others - like Mother Teresa of Calcutta or Father Kolbe - no one fails to recognize how absolute and beautiful his value is.

Among the people who have lived more "valuable" or more beautiful lives, there are many who can be proposed as "models" of conduct, both universally and locally. Good educators rely on these "models" to draw the attention especially of children (boys and girls often grasp beauty through slightly different "motives") and of young people to higher ideals, even if it takes more effort to reach them. Among these "models" the saints stand out, especially the saints who are closer in time, because we know more details of their lives or we know better the circumstances in which they had to live and witness to their faith, and therefore it is easier for us to identify with them.

Derivately, beauty is found in human achievements: outstanding literary texts, works of art of all times, images that elevate the spirit by their quality, strength or fineness. Likewise, so many stories or narrations awaken the noblest human feelings and attitudes; as well as games that combine beauty with the attractiveness of technology. And in all times music has been a piece core topic for the Education.

Today we have much of this in good cinema, which combines the symbolic language of the icon and narration. Bruno Forte writes that the cinema board "the icon with its evocative force and the narration with its potential of open and contagious story" (cf. On the threshold of beauty, Valencia, 2004). The narration transmits and inserts in the experience of what is narrated, and arouses interest with the financial aid of the argumentation.

Cinema lives on icons in continuous succession. That is why it is Pass to open up to transcendence, this author maintains, on condition that it respects a double no: no to manifesting life as something closed in on itself that reduces human dignity to needs and appetites; and at the same time no to reducing one of the two poles, the human or the divine (as bad is a spiritualist message that annuls the human as the reduction of the divine to a human ideology). In short, cinema that seeks to present human values open to transcendence must avoid saying too much as well as saying too little (cf. Ibid.). All of this is possible in a film that is not explicitly religious. Moreover, sometimes the univocally religious sometimes cloys and spoils the human, and closes "by excess" the way to the Mystery.

As far as poetry is concerned, its beauty financial aid to understand that truth is not so much that which is possessed as a vision of the previously hidden (Greek sense of truth); but rather a Someone who possesses you while questioning you, so that in the path of listening He enkindles in you the real questions (Hebrew sense of truth, which has to do with fidelity and love) (cf. Ibid.).

But above all, perhaps beauty is discovered in the personal values of those we deal with more or less directly (and we can even discover it in some values that we ourselves can embody). We have spoken of so many men and women, who in various fields (scientific, humanistic, sports, etc.) can be proposed as "models" for the values they developed in their lives, in the service of others.

The encyclical Lumen fidei states that, to the extent that people open themselves to love with a sincere heart and translate this openness into action, they are already on the path to faith. Even if they do not realize it, "they try to live as if God existed, at times because they recognize his importance in order to find sure guidance in their common life, and at other times because they experience the desire for light in the darkness, but also because they sense, in view of the greatness and beauty of life, that it would be even greater with the presence of God" (n. 35).

The path of beauty is "one of the possible itineraries, perhaps the most attractive and fascinating, for understanding and reaching God" (Benedict XVI, Message to the Pontifical Academies, November 25, 2008). It is good to keep this in mind today, even in the face of new technologies.

PUBLISHED IN RELIGION CONFIDENTIAL