I was a deacon when I arrived to our English mission in Eastleigh, in September of 2023. Immediately, one of the tasks I was given was the Student Youth, the group of the parish geared towards young people from ages 14 to 18. We gather every Friday evening, beginning with dinner together, followed by a game and ending with a discussion.
Among the various kids present at that first meeting, there was Jenna [invented name, editor’s note], a girl of 14 years, born and raised in the United Kingdom to an English mother and an Australian father. To say that she seemed to be uninterested in the meetings would have been a euphemism. As she would eventually admit to me later on, the only reason that she had decided to come to the group was to receive her confirmation and then disappear. And yet, despite the reluctance that she often showed, she continued to come, week after week.
As the months continued, she made some profound friendships, in particular with two other girls. Beginning from these relationships, she began to come more eagerly to the group and to participate more actively in the meetings. A profound desire was ignited in her to become closer to God. She began to pray again and to go to Mass, after a few years of not going. Then, during the summer, the day of the Confirmation arrived. As did the end, for that year, of the Student Youth meetings. When we gathered again, in September, Jenna was there. Being the beginning of a new year, during the meeting, I asked the kids this question: “Why are you here?”. Jenna responded: “The past year I began to come to the group only to receive Confirmation. But this summer, in the month and a half that we did not meet, I felt something missing in my life. I felt I was missing this ‘sense of community’ that I had begun to experience with Student Youth. And so, when I was told that the meetings were going to begin again, I decided to come back.” It was September of 2024.
Young people are searching for a home. A home that can welcome her but that can allow them also to depart.
I believe that for that year Jenna did not miss a single meeting. She was always there, even when her friends were not. She began to come to the study group and to help with the Come and See club, a proposal in the style of an Italian oratory that we make to the smaller children during the school vacations at the halfway point of a quadrimester. Deciding to help with the children was difficult for her; it was not something she would have chosen of her own initiative. And yet, before the proposal to give of her own time gratuitously to learn to love her own friends more, she had decided to go beyond that which initially was not attractive to her.
In September of 2025, her father told her that they were about to move back to Australia and that they would go at the end of January of the following year. Jenna does not take it well at all. She rebels at the idea of leaving everything that she knows, all of the beauty she had seen, to begin again from scratch on the other side of the world. She is so displeased with the idea of leaving that she doesn’t tell anyone, not even her friends. However, about halfway through December, when the date was already approaching rapidly, she told us. ANd we decided to organize a party to send her off, the last Friday she would spend in England, two days before leaving. And the party was beautiful. But the most beautiful thing was the letter that Jenna wrote to us priests to say goodbye. There is a sentence that struck me in a particularly profound way: “It doesn’t matter where I am moving to; I know that the Church is my home and it will always be.”
I am often asked what young people of today are looking for. There are many answers that could be given but one of these, the truest, is what Jenna herself indicated. Young people are searching for a home. A home that can welcome them but that can allow them also to depart. A home that can let each person leave everything to go to the opposite side of the globe because they are certain of belonging. A home inhabited by God.
