On February 28, Pope Francis met with the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, which had gathered to study the topic of the transmission of the faith in the current moment of educational emergency or urgency.

The Pope was interested in "the anthropological presuppositions that exist today in the transmission of the faith, which make it an educational emergency for young people (...). And this led him to go back to some of the main guidelines of the Education

a) First, the guideline that educating is not only transmitting knowledge, but also implies other dimensions: transmitting contents, habits and values . All three together.

Indeed, this can be seen from a classical view of the person, compatible with the Christian faith that we have described somewhere as resting on three interrelated dimensions or pillars: reason, experience and tradition.

The person is reason (intelligence and freedom, spirituality and freedom), is experience (being corporeality, having external and internal senses, is capable of perceiving the world around him and interacting with it) and is tradition (sociability, community, language, communication, history), a word that comes from submit to others what we have received on our part.

According to reason, the Education must provide cognitive "contents" for the realization staff. In response to experience, Education should help to form "habits" (conduct acquired through repetition of acts, ideally good, that engender what we call virtues). And in response to tradition or human sociability, Education should be concerned with awakening interests and "values" or evaluations by means of a dialogue that teaches the integration of reason and experience.  

Pope Francis is interested not only in Education in general but also in Education in the faith, and for this reason he applies his first guideline to the transmission of the faith: "In order to transmit the faith, it is necessary to create the habit of a behavior, it is necessary to create the reception of values that prepare it and make it grow, and it is necessary to give basic contents". And he explains what would happen if the Education of the faith is reduced to cognitive contents: "If we only want to transmit the faith with contents, it will be a superficial or ideological thing that will not have roots". Therefore: "the transmission has to be of contents with values, evaluations and habits, habits of conduct". And he gives the example of confessors when they help to create habits of conduct, together with contents and values. 

b) Second guideline -starting again from Education in general-, what Francis calls educating utopia, and the relationship between utopia, report and discernment. Utopia is a word that has its roots in classical Greek. It literally means a place that does not exist, and here it refers to the ideals that young people propose to themselves. The Pope says that in Argentina, because of a bad Education of utopia, there were boys of Catholic Action who ended up in the guerrilla in the seventies.

In the words of Francis, "to know how to lead and help the utopia of a young person to grow is a richness". A young person without utopia - he explains - is an old man ahead of his time, he has grown old before his time. How can we make sure that this illusion that the young person has, this utopia, leads him to meeting with Jesus Christ?

And he suggests that utopia must be accompanied by report and discernment. "Utopia looks to the future, report looks to the past, and the present is discerned. The young person has to receive the report and plant, root his utopia in that report. Discern in the present his utopia, the signs of the times, and there, yes, the utopia goes forward but deeply rooted in the report, in the history he has received."

In other words, young people need teachers to help them discern the present on the basis of the report, and to project it towards the future, towards the utopia that is most proper to the young. Hence, says the Pope, the insistence of the meeting of young people with their grandparents (he evokes the icon of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple); for the latter provide them with the report that the former lack.

Remember a Kurosawa* movie where the father and mother go to the United States and leave the kids with the grandmother. She tells them about the report of her town. And when the parents return, they are left out of place, outside the report. The meeting between youth and grandparents kept the faith in the Eastern countries during the communist era. And the example of the film serves to explain why also in the case of the Eastern countries the parents have not met Jesus, while the grandparents have taught him to the young people.

All this is complemented in the transmission of the faith to young people, Francis adds, with "the body-to-body apostolate" that a good confessor or a good director who spends many hours listening to young people can do. "report of the past, discernment of the present, utopia of the future, in that outline a young person's faith grows".

c) A third guideline is connected to the current problem of the "throwaway culture", to which the Pope has referred on other occasions. On this occasion he focuses on young people as victims: 

"Today, because of the Economics that has been implanted in the world, where the god of money is at the center and not the human person, everything else is ordered and what does not fit in this order is discarded. The children who are superfluous, who bother or who are not convenient to come are discarded". In this context he evokes the sad realities of abortion, euthanasia, drugs and gambling.

Contents, habits and values; report, discernment and utopia; context of a throwaway culture; not reducing the transmission of faith to cognitive contents; importance of transmitting the historical report (role of grandparents) and at the same time teaching to discern and educate ideals; dignity of the person and value of human life as important ethical references today. Here are some anthropological presuppositions that the Pope wanted to highlight.

In conclusion, Francis points out, we need to give the traditio fidei (tradition, submission or Education of faith) which is also traditio spei (tradition or Education of hope); because disenchanted young people must be given faith and hope.

* Probably refers to the film "Rhapsody in August" ( A. Kurosawa, 1991).