Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti of Perugia said that the theme of the
2018 Synod of Bishops — youth, faith, and vocational discernment — is
“exceptionally important” because it is an “authentic product of a mode
of being Church that comes directly from the Second Vatican Council” and
because of “the disconcerting superficiality with which one speaks of
the young.”In a column published on the front page of the October 19 edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the prelate referred to the “existential poverty” of youth, citing Pope Francis’s descriptions of youth as “orphaned children of living parents” and “disoriented and without rules.”
Cardinal Bassetti also spoke of the “social poverty” that characterizes youth, citing “a humiliating economic precariousness that, in the case of women, is accompanied by an odious blackmail: choose between desired motherhood and necessary labor.”