EDITORIAL
Augusta is a 20-year-old girl and when she smiles her face lights up, with a gaze that is frank and full of life. Nobody could imagine that she is a survivor of the streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone. This young woman could very well call herself a "warrior" on her Facebook profile and she would not be lying.
Young people lying in their bed, with their headphones on, staring at the phone, waiting for the day to pass and the next one to arrive. This is the image of millions of kids every Sunday afternoon. It is the reality that a great number of young people live today, in a situation of existential emptiness, as underlined by the Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl, referring to an existence without values. It is an evil that grows in our societies like an epidemic.
It is a fact that digital communication is a challenge for the Church. In the last Synod of Bishops, the network is spoken of as a space of evangelization, like a continent to explore, like a new place to live. The old "information highways" have now become true "constellations of content", with about 1,400 million websites on the network and their number grows exponentially, while every day new virtual communities of meetings and discussions arise according to the different tastes and needs of people.
The Synod of Bishops on young people began in a difficult and apparently unfavorable context for the Church, amid tensions, disbelief, decline in vocations and open challenges to the Church's teachings on important issues such as the right to life and the role of the Christian faith in the social fabric and in human rights. On the other hand, despite the complex circumstances surrounding this event, a sign of communion and hope is the presence of two continental Chinese bishops who "for the first time" can participate in a Synod.