It's all about looks, as this column also demonstrates. You can describe the Meeting through the words of politicians, their statements that make headlines in major newspapers, the clicks, and the likes. Or you can describe it through stories. This is the other Meeting, the one that talks about life, about young people, about the discarded.

A dialogue between a psychologist and psychotherapist, Luigi Ceriani, and a priest, Father Federico Picchetto, was at the heart of the meeting “Adolescents and Young People in Distress” at the Compagnia delle Opere arena. On the table was everything that COVID has caused to explode in terms of eating disorders, aggressive behaviors, hospitalizations, and suicide attempts. To address these issues, Ceriani explains, we need to look at the young people themselves. Look at them, not their problems.
“If for me you are just an eating disorder, or you are ADHD, I don't see you, you as a person.” The educational relationship is also therapeutic. There are teachers capable of saving lives. And it’s all about how they look at you: “With young people, it’s important to go all out,” adds Father Federico, “to give yourself freely. It starts with the idea that this ground is sacred: through their life, someone else comes to visit me. Otherwise, you become a teacher so busy that you can’t even look them in the eye.”

There are no bad kids. 25 years spent behind the bars of the Beccaria Juvenile Detention Center in Milan taught this to Father Claudio Burgio, who, together with criminal lawyer Paolo Tosoni, was the protagonist of the meeting “Mare Dentro” organized by Tracce. “There are no bad kids. Evil exists, but it is not the last word,” he explains. “There is a path to follow. But if you have the patience to listen and walk this path, you can look beyond. To grow, you need to know how to wait, with hope.” Despite a context that Father Burgio does not hesitate to define as inhuman: “I’m not surprised by the riots in prisons. You cannot rediscover forgiveness within a system that reeks of revenge. Instead, it is forgiveness that rekindles hope.” “Every story is unique. You enter it, and you learn.”

History is not predetermined, not even in human and animal evolution. Until a few decades ago, as Carlo Bellieni, professor of Pediatrics, biologist Pier Francesco Ferrari, and philosopher Evandro Agazzi explained in the meeting on the true secret of evolution, it was thought that history was written, and evolution had fixed rules and was based on struggle or chance. But that’s not the case; there’s also a lot of collaboration at play. Today, science says that the environment can influence our evolution. This is also evident in Pediatrics. A mother's caresses or violence against a child determine their growth, their adulthood. But, in a unique case ever studied, even the child in the womb “influences” the mother’s health. Their cells enter the bloodstream and make her stronger, more capable of facing the pregnancy. A true miracle.

Like the one that happens in the families of the Pope John XXIII community, who welcome those who have no family all over the world, as explained by the president of the community, Matteo Fadda, at the meeting “Family, a Place of Hope.” The example comes from Don Oreste Benzi. Again, it’s all about looks, on the frontier. “Those who are afraid of you haven’t looked you in the eye,” said Pope Francis in Lesbos. Looks that change history.

From the podcast “L'altro Meeting” by Daniela Verlicchi