Pope: Écoles de Vie(s) highlights intrinsic value of each person

By Christopher Wells

Pope Francis on Friday received promoters of the “Écoles de Vie(s)” project, a French program inspired by the Global Compact on Education that aims at educating “by bringing out the specificity of each person and our capacity to relate to others.”

The program works at creating spaces that “will also be meeting places between people with disabilities, entrepreneurs in the social and solidarity economy, as well as leaders in public and economic life and local residents.”

An open, outgoing Church

“By welcoming everyone with their frailties and by bringing together a large number of actors, you embody that outgoing Church that I have often called for,” Pope Francis told them; “an open Church, a welcoming Church, capable of making itself close to everyone, and of healing the wounds of those who suffer, of tenderly caressing those who are deprived of affection, and of lifting up those who have fallen to the ground.”

The Holy Father said their formation project “with the Gospel and the Church’s social teaching at its heart, highlights a fundamental truth: every person, however fragile, is the bearer of an intrinsic value…every human life has an inalienable dignity.”

He emphasized that they are following the example of Jesus, who in His ministry, reached out to everyone, especially the marginalized. Jesus, he said, “changes the meaning of their experience,” inviting everyone, no matter their limitations, to enter into a unique relationship with God” that always leads to personal flourishing.

Formation in compassion and fraternal love

The Pope went on to note that the Écoles de Vie(s) project is “firmly in line with the vision of education proposed by the Global Compact on education: an integral education that does not merely transmit human knowledge, but seeks to form men and women capable of compassion and fraternal love.”

Concluding his address, Pope Francis encouraged his audience “to persevere with determination,” because, he said, “only by restoring centrality to the human person, by integrating his or her spiritual dimensions, can we build a truly just and united society.”

“May your commitment inspire other initiatives in favour of the most vulnerable,” the Pope said, “and may your action open new perspectives for an integral education that the younger generations urgently need.”