Youth and faith: “saying in a new way the things of all time”

By Ferdinando Colombo On Feb 27, 2025

An excerpt from an interview by Fr Ferdinando Colombo with Fr Alberto Ravagnani, the priest who also speaks to young people through social media

Don Alberto Ravagnani, born in 1993, ordained in 2018, is now at the parish of San Michele Arcangelo in Busto Arsizio (Varese).

On social media he counts staggering numbers: 150,000 followers on Instagram, 150,000 on YouTube and 93,000 on Tik Tok. His followers, mostly young people, he acquired them by sharing since the pandemic period videos in which he talked about faith and prayer.

He has always been characterized by a straightforward, clear communication style capable of getting straight to the point and especially to the hearts of young people. “God is what gives meaning to my life, he is the reason I wake up in the morning. The reason I know what to do every day, the reason I face challenges, failures. The reason I stand in front of a world I don’t like, and still keep hoping. The reason I continue to love, even when it seems to make no sense.”

In 2022 Fr. Alberto together with professionals from the world of communication (Rosa Giuffrè, Silvia Tabasso, Giulio Gaudiano, Francesco Lorenzi, Paolo De Nadai, Fr. Luigi Maria Epicoco, Luca Bernabei, Fr. Roberto Pasolini, Matteo Fiocco) founded the LabOratorium APS Association with the twofold goal of:

1. to communicate the Gospel in a language more suited to today’s world;
2. to bring the Church back to the forefront of communication (as it has been in the past).

The Association offers training courses for members and non-members, events and activities to a target audience ranging from 14 to 30 years old and is aimed at associations, dioceses or realities that wish to improve their communication in the service of young people.

A first question:

Teenagers and young people for many realities seem to be an almost impossible target to involve in a deep faith journey and yet the experience of fraternity tells us otherwise: can you tell us about it?

The problem of the Church today is that it struggles to connect with the new generations. This is a problem of society as a whole and of the Church in particular.

There are no longer the adults that there used to be, there are no longer the young people that there used to be, the world has really changed and is running at a speed that humanity has never seen before, so from year to year the evolution on a technological level and therefore also on a social level are more and more and it is hard to keep up.

So never before has society, and therefore also the Church, had to run after the world to stay within the world. And on the part of the Church, which is such an institutional institution, this is really difficult, because the strength of the Church for centuries has always been the solidity of tradition. Today, the solidity of tradition has to learn to go hand in hand with the newness of language, so the Church has to learn to say in an ever-new way the things that have always been said, however, also rather quickly.

In this delay, those who get lost are the young people, who live within a context that is very different from that of their parents or their priests and therefore have an approach to reality, to life that is certainly very different. They speak differently, they have different categories, they reason differently, they have a brain that is activated differently than that of adults, and so the difficulty in communicating with young people is due to this.

Now “Fraternity” is an attempt to be Church in a new way, that is, the same Church as always but with the language of today, and we do this starting from the bottom by involving the young people as protagonists of a proposal not as recipients of a project that is dropped from above.

It is the boys who, when they encounter the Gospel, become missionaries, they go to their peers, they talk about Jesus and they do it in their own way, which will be imprecise, it will not be theologically always well-founded, it will be a little approximate, but it is the language that today manages to touch the hearts of boys.

And so this is starting a process that is the process of evangelization, which creates social ties, which creates belonging t, which creates fraternity, precisely, which a little bit at a time is going many places and this is also a sign of the times.

Today Fraternity reaches the hearts of so many young people, of so many parishes, of so many dioceses, in a transversal way somewhat as if it were a social network of the Church; in reality it is an ecclesial experience, they are ecclesial ties, they are friendship in Christ that however have the freedom to go beyond canonical boundaries, not to eliminate them, not to boycott them, but simply because today in addition to the territorial institutional levels there are virtual dimensions, there are memberships that are freer.

Today’s society is liquid or gaseous, and the Church also has to find a more liquid and more gaseous form in order to be able to penetrate inside today’s society and thus touch people’s lives concretely.

So the difficulty of today’s Church in communicating with children lies in the language that needs to update and lies in the form with which the Church lives today. The form of today’s Church and the language of today’s Church were fine until 30-40-50 years ago now not anymore, it doesn’t mean that the content of the Church is no longer fine, it doesn’t mean that the identity of the Church is no longer fine, however, perhaps a different form and language needs to be found.

(Fr. F. Colombo, “Vivere la fraternità per essere Chiesa”, Vivere, May 2023, p. 8)

Source

Vivere (Sacro Cuore magazine)

Image

Fr Alberto Ravagnani’s fb profile