International Youth Advisory Body: the new members in Rome for their first Meeting

From December 9-13, 2024, the First Meeting of New Members of the International Youth Advisory Body (IYAB) is taking place in Rome.

Sharing, mutual listening and spirt of mission

Twenty young people, from different regions across the world and several international movements, associations and communities, are gathering to meet the Staff of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, and to share the experience of reciprocal listening, in order to start their mission for which they have been appointed last October.

De Paula Souza: “Be promoters of Christus Vivit among your peers and pastors”

This second group of IYAB, as well as the first, will play an important advisory and proactive role, collaborating in synodal style with the Dicastery, to further explore issues related to the pastoral care for youth, family, human life, Ecclesial Movements and Associations, elderly pastoral care, and other topics of more general interest, in cooperation also with other Dicasteries of the Roman Curia.

In a welcome meeting with all the heads of the Dicastery, Mr. Gleison De Paula Souza, Secretary, invited them all to be promoters of Christus Vivit Post-Synodal Exhortation among their peers and pastors, so to fulfill the mission entrusted them at the end of the Synod for Youth in 2018, when the Final Document of the Synod urged the establishment of such Body to support the activity of the Dicastery’s Youth Office (cf. No. 123).

“This is the mission of the Church: to be like the Good Shepherd, seeking the lost and creating a welcoming camp tent for this generation”, said Msgr. Gervasi

All members participated, then, in the Opening Mass celebrated by the Adjunt Secretary, H. Exc. Msgr. Dario Gervasi, who reflected of the specific mission of IYAB as a part of the mission of the entire Church: “This is the mission of the Church: to be like the Good Shepherd, – said during the homily - tirelessly seeking the lost and creating a welcoming camp tent for this generation. And this mission belongs to all of us. As young lay people, you have a vital role to play in this extraordinary work”.

Conversations in the Spirit, in the synodal path

The gather will continue until Friday 13^th with working groups, moments of sharing and mutual listening, also following the synodal method of the conversations in the Spirit.