Panel Discussion - Catholic Youth Formation and Action
Some Reflections from Msgr. Robert J. Vitillo, of Catholic Charities USA
YCS Panel Discussion
Catholic Youth Formation and Action — Young Christian Students (YCS) Movement
Some Reflections from
Msgr. Robert J. Vitillo, of Catholic Charities USA
And former Advisor on the HIV/AIDS Pandemic to
the International Secretariat of IYCS
28 June 2026
RESPONSE 1: “How has our past YCS experience helped us to grow as persons of faith and action?”
There is a phrase that often was echoed in the YCS movement: “Every YCS member is a missionary.” Not the classic missionary who leaves her or his home country, culture, and moves to an area of the world that may not have heard anything about Jesus’ Gospel or the Catholic Church. YCS missionaries were encouraged to preach and live the gospel, now, today, in the classroom, in the hallway, in the neighborhood. Perhaps this is the main reason that YCS has the power to form young people not just as churchgoers, but as disciples who act especially in today’s secularized world.
YCS was founded by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn with a singular vision: to bring students to Christ, and Christ to students. What set Cardijn’s method apart was his refusal to treat young people as passive recipients of formation. He believed that the best apostle to a student is another student. And so he built a movement structured around what we came to know as the Review of Life — the See-Judge-Act methodology. You look honestly at your world. You bring it into judgment with the light of the Gospel. And then you act as part of a holistic way of life.
Pope St. John Paul II captured this vision when he wrote in Christifideles Laici that “youth must not simply be considered as an object of pastoral concern for the Church: in fact, young people are and ought to be encouraged to be active on behalf of the Church as leading characters in evangelization and participants in the renewal of society” (Christifideles Laici, §46). In the same document, St. John Paul II called adolescence and young adulthood “particularly significant and decisive moments for discerning God’s call and embracing the mission entrusted by Him” (Christifideles Laici, §58). YCS takes that claim seriously. This is the reason the YCS movement asks young people not to wait until they are older, more educated, or more spiritually polished before they engage. It asks them to act now — and to discover their faith in the acting.
In Christus Vivit (2019), Pope Francis strongly echoed this conviction strongly. He affirms that young people are not just the future of the Church — they are the present. They are not receptacles for evangelization; they are its protagonists. The peer-to-peer model that YCS embodies — the Review of Life conducted by students, for students, facilitated but not dominated by adults — is precisely the kind of structure Francis envisioned when he called the Church to trust youth with genuine responsibility.
And at the heart of this formation is love. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Deus Caritas Est that “love is the light — and in the end, the only light — that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working” (Deus Caritas Est, 2005). That is what See-Judge-Act produces in students who engage with it faithfully: not an ideological program, not a checklist of good works, but a growing capacity to see the world with the eyes of love, and to respond. Benedict’s words to young people at World Youth Day 2007 ring just as true today: “Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything.”
The data supports what experienced youth ministers have always known. A 2023–24 international survey by the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Footprints Research Group — conducted across 4,889 young people in eight countries — found that 50% of young people reported an increased interest in spirituality over the past five years, while only 15% reported a decline. Young people are not indifferent to faith. They are hungry for a faith that connects to real life. The Diocese of San José’s 2024 Young Adult Survey, with nearly 1,000 responses, found that 85% of respondents had participated in community service projects, with younger respondents aged 18 to 23 reporting the highest levels of involvement. The desire for meaningful action is already there.
In his address to Italian Catholic Action Youth on December 19, 2025, Pope Leo XIV called on young people to holiness with an urgency that felt personally directed: “To become saints, like Pier Giorgio Frassati — who was part of Catholic Action — and like Carlo Acutis: I encourage you to imitate their passion for the Gospel and their works, always animated by charity.” He went further, offering a definition of Catholic action that strikes to the core of what YCS has always sought to be: “To make peace is the quintessential ‘Catholic action’, because it is the gesture that makes us witnesses of Jesus, the Redeemer of the world.”
This is the formation that YCS offers. Not merely skills. Not merely information. But a life shaped by encounter with Christ — an encounter that overflows into encounter with neighbor, and neighbor, and neighbor after that. When we ask how our past YCS experience has helped us grow as persons of faith and action, the honest answer is: it gave us a method that is also a spirituality. It taught us to look, to judge, to act — and to do it together, as a community of friends who also are missionaries.
RESPONSE 2: “What opportunities does the Church offer for youth and young adult formation for Catholic action?”
If you walked into most parishes and asked to see the pathways they offer for forming young people for genuine Catholic action — not just participation, but formation for mission in the world — you might find a lot of energy and a fair amount of confusion. There are programs, there are events, there are conferences. But do they form young people to be protagonists? Do they help them move from service to solidarity, from charity to justice? The Church offers extraordinary opportunities. The question is whether we are deploying them with the clarity and intentionality they deserve.
Let us start with a crucial distinction — one that Pope Benedict XVI makes with characteristic precision in Deus Caritas Est. He cited both the Church’s duty of charity and the pursuit of justice: “The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice” (Deus Caritas Est, §28–29). Both dimensions are necessary. A Church that only feeds the hungry but never asks why people are hungry has not yet fully obeyed the Gospel. And a Church that only advocates for structural change but never kneels beside the suffering person has forgotten something essential about love.
I once was asked to address a distinguished group of professors and their families who frequented the Catholic Chapel at Yale University – they asked me to speak on the topic “Is Charity Just?” I said that I only would speak on this topic only if I could ask the second question
Is Justice charitable?” While I served at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as the Executive Director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, we often called charity and justice as the “two feet if social development”.
St. John Paul II had already drawn this same double line in Christifideles Laici: “Charity towards one’s neighbor... represent the most immediate, ordinary and habitual ways that lead to the Christian animation of the temporal order, the specific duty of the lay faithful” (§41). But he was equally clear that “the lay faithful are never to relinquish their participation in ‘public life’... the defense and the promotion of justice” (§42). Formation for Catholic action must hold both. Soup kitchens and policy advocacy. Tutoring children and challenging the systems that under-resource their schools. Service and solidarity.
In Christus Vivit, Pope Francis pushed this even further. He called young people to be protagonists — not passive participants — in the life of the Church and of society. He explicitly encouraged youth engagement in political life and solidarity with the poor, insisting that young people who are formed in authentic faith will not remain indifferent to the suffering of the world around them. In his message for the 40th Anniversary of World Youth Day on October 7, 2025, Pope Leo XIV strongly echoed this call: “work together, from volunteerism to ‘political charity,’ to build new living conditions for all.” He warned young people: “Do not follow those who use the words of faith to divide; instead, make plans to remove inequalities and reconcile divided and oppressed communities.” And at the Jubilee of Youth on August 2, 2025, he was even direct: “Seek justice in order to build a more humane world. Serve the poor, and so bear witness to the good that we would always like to receive from our neighbours.”
The Church’s landscape of formation opportunities for youth spans both dimensions. The Young Christian Students and Young Christian Workers movements, connected globally through the International YCS and the International Young Christian Workers, offer the most methodologically rigorous peer-led formation available to Catholic youth today — the See-Judge-Act Review of Life remains unmatched as a tool for connecting faith to the realities of daily life. Catholic Relief Services and Caritas youth programs provide pathways for both direct service and global solidarity advocacy. The USCCB’s Sons and Daughters of Light pastoral plan offers a national framework. The National Catholic Youth Conference, Steubenville Conferences, and Campus Ministry programs reach young people at key formation moments. The Laudato Si’ Action Platform, for which I serve as focal point on behalf of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, engages youth around integral ecology. And the upcoming World Youth Day 2027 in Seoul, following the Jubilee of Youth 2025, provides anchor moments of universal encounter.
Speaking to the National Meeting of Catholic Religion Teachers on April 25, 2026, Pope Leo offered a reminder that grounds all of these efforts: “The religious dimension ‘is a constitutive element of the human experience and cannot be marginalized in the educational process of the younger generations.’” Formation is not an add-on to education. It is its deepest purpose.
And yet the data calls us to honest reckoning. The Life Teen 2024 State of Catholic Youth Report found that only 24% of American youth identify as Catholic. That is not a crisis to be managed — it is a mission to be embraced. But there is genuine reason for hope: Barna Group 2025 data shows that Gen Z now attends church an average of 1.9 times per month, the highest of any generation currently, suggesting a genuine hunger for community and encounter. And Springtide Research Institute’s 2025 findings show that Catholicism is the most popular denomination among young Christians aged 13 to 25 in the United States, with 28% identifying as Catholic. The opportunities are real. The hunger is real. What remains is the question of whether our formation structures are ready to meet it.
RESPONSE 3: “What recommendations do we have to develop these opportunities for Catholic action among youth and young adults?”
With your permission, I will propose some concrete recommendations, rooted in the evidence and in the Church’s own Teaching, for developing genuine formation for Catholic action among young people.
Before we name them, let us hold one phrase steady as our foundation. Pope John Paul II wrote in Christifideles Laici: “The Church has so much to talk about with youth, and youth have so much to share with the Church. This mutual dialogue... will be a source of richness and youthfulness for the Church and civil society” (§46). Formation is not the Church dispensing wisdom to empty vessels. It is a conversation — mutual, generative, Spirit-led.
First: we could revitalize the Young Christian Students movement and similar peer-led movements built around the See-Judge-Act methodology. The Review of Life works because it roots formation in the real lives of real young people, rather than imported content from outside their experience. It forms the habit of reflection. It builds the capacity for discernment. It makes missionaries, not merely attendees. Where YCS chapters exist, they should be nourished. Where they do not, they could be planted.
Second: we must invest in adult mentors and chaplains. Cardijn’s own insight was paradoxical but profoundly wise: “the chaplain is everything and nothing.” Everything, because without an adult who is genuinely present, spiritually grounded, and willing to step back, peer-led movements collapse. Nothing, because the moment the chaplain takes over, the movement ceases to be peer-led. We need adults who know how to be present without being dominant — a formation challenge for ministers and educators in its own right.
Third: we should consider building explicit pathways from charitable service to justice analysis. When a young person spends a Saturday at a food bank, that is beautiful, and it must not stop there. The next question is: why are people hungry? The one after that: what can I do about the systems that produce hunger? Pope Benedict XVI wrote that formation requires “hearts which see” — people formed not merely in technique but in the capacity to be moved by love (Deus Caritas Est, §31). A heart that sees does not stop at the immediate need. It traces the chain of cause and asks harder questions.
Fourth: we need to integrate digital platforms that intentionally aim to engage in formation — not merely for entertainment or promotion. The Diocese of San José’s 2024 Young Adult Survey found that 51% of active young adults use religious apps or websites, making digital formation not a luxury but a necessity. This does not mean replacing community. It means extending it — providing resources for reflection, connecting young people across geographies, and meeting them where they already spend significant time.
Fifth: programs must be developed with genuine sensitivity to enculturation, particularly for Hispanic and Latino youth, who constitute approximately 33% of Catholic youth in the United States. One-size-fits-all formation is a failure of pastoral imagination. The richness of Latino Catholic culture, its communal spirituality, its devotional traditions, and its lived sense of the faith, are not deficits to be corrected. They are gifts to be built upon. Of course, on this joyous occasion, we have representatives of a plethora of cultures and diverse religious and liturgical expressions even within the one Catholic Church. Our young people need to learn how to preserve those cultural and religious traditions but also to share the gospel and action in charity and justice with a wider group of people in today’s world.
Sixth: we could connect youth to global solidarity networks — the International Young Christian Students, Caritas Internationalis, Catholic Relief Services — so that formation opens outward to the world, not inward to a single parish or diocese. At the Jubilee of Youth in August 2025, Pope Leo offered a vision of exactly this kind of expansive missionary identity: “How much the world needs missionaries of the Gospel who are witnesses of justice and peace! How much the future needs men and women who are witnesses of hope.” That is our goal. That is who we are forming.
And seventh, we must center the Eucharist and prayer as the non-negotiable source of Catholic action these are constitutive elements in our Catholic faith — not optional extras, not add-ons to the program, but the spring from which everything else flows. The Footprints Research Group survey found that Catholics who are knowledgeable about and committed to their faith show distinct patterns of regular religious practice. Formation and practice are not separate tracks. They are the same journey.
Pope Francis, in Christus Vivit, asked the Church to listen to youth “with the same seriousness and interest that young people can show when they speak to one another” (§174). Pope Leo XIV told young people at the Jubilee of Youth: “Aspire to great things, to holiness, wherever you are. Do not settle for less. Then you will see the light of the Gospel grow every day, within you and around you.” And Leo also reminded us that “Jesus chose to call his disciples ‘friends’... Christian witness is the fruit of a relationship of faith and love with Jesus” — from his WYD 40th Anniversary message of October 7, 2025.
These seven recommendations are not a master plan. They are an invitation — to dioceses, to parishes, to movements, such as YCS to each of us YCS alumni in this room — to take seriously our shared responsibility for the formation of a generation, including youth and young adults, that the Church needs, and that the world desperately needs, to be missionary disciples.
Citations:
Pope John Paul II, Christifideles Laici (1988), §§41, 42, 46, 58, 63
Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (2005), §§28–29, 31; World Youth Day 2007 Message
Pope Francis, Christus Vivit (2019), §174
Pope Leo XIV, Address to Italian Catholic Action Youth (19 December 2025)
Pope Leo XIV, Message for World Youth Day 40th Anniversary (7 October 2025)
Pope Leo XIV, Jubilee of Youth Address (August 2–3, 2025)
Pope Leo XIV, Address to National Meeting of Catholic Religion Teachers (25 April 2026)
Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Footprints Research Group International Survey (2023–24), 4,889 youth in 8 countries
Diocese of San José 2024 Young Adult Survey (nearly 1,000 responses)
Life Teen 2024 State of Catholic Youth Report
Barna Group 2025 Gen Z Church Attendance Data
Springtide Research Institute 2025 Youth Religious Identity Data
Pew Research Center 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study
PRRI 2025 Youth Church Attendance Data