L' educazione popolare nella pastorale giovanile milanse negli anni dell' episcopato del Cardinal Ferrari

Cardinal Ferrari’s episcopate (1894-1921) was an age of unknown liveliness for Milan parish youth clubs. It was marked by an educational and organisational transformation whose purpose was to meet the growing upbringing needs coming from the process of industrialization and modernisation which was affecting Milan society. The Archiepiscopal Chart drawn in 1904 came into being as a successful synthesis of the traditional Archbishop Borromeo’s approach to youth pastoral centred upon catechesis and the pressing need to update, while interacting with the national youth education scholarship promoted by the Salesians of Don Bosco and that of the Oratory by Filippo Neri. Milan parish youth clubs drew up a wide-ranging project of popular education which included religious, moral, patriotic and even physical-hygienic upbringing targets for the young, to be carried out by innovative resources such as physical education, cinema, acting-out, as well as up-to-date charitable opportunities which were backed up by the well-established everlasting activities of catechism and game time. Despite being embedded into a planning process shaped by traditionally imprinted educational models but also oriented to innovation, the Milan parish-youth-club movement epitomised a type of youth pastoral which would mark definitely the history of the youth educational-oriented approach of the Church.