On May 20, the "Scholas occurentesThe "The Children's Villages of the World" received a visit from Pope Francis in Rome. The occasion was the opening of new branches that make them able to reach more than one million children and young people around the world.
The Scholas are inclusive pedagogical projects that aim to break down walls: workshops for a culture of encounter that, in addition, work with strong support from sports and art. Membership is very simple: the director of a given institute only has to accredit it on the website www.scholasoccurrentes.org.
The idea came twenty years ago to the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio. It was he who proposed a "rescue plan"for young people who were at risk of becoming a "generation at risk of being discarded". Situated on the margins of the productive system, many of them are confined in an eternal false present: a timeless moment deprived of both memory and the prospect of tomorrow.
More than a school in the canonical sense, "Scholas"is a network of church-sponsored schools that seeks to harmonize the language of the head with the language of the heart and the language of the hands. It says of itself that it is both an institution and a story. Scholas is the story of its own journey towards the encounters it recreates.
Scholas was born on March 29, 2000, when on a beautiful southern autumn morning, Bergoglio, shovel in hand, planted a tree that he would call the "olive tree of peace". Next to him were students from public and private schools, Catholic and of other religions, who began to open up to each other discussing small and large issues related to the city, the country and the world. Since then, that small seed has grown into a plant that integrates students from 190 countries.
