In his words to members of the Toniolo Young Professionals Association, whom he received in audience at the Vatican Apostolic Palace on Friday morning, Francis said that he was concerned “to hear about young people entrenched behind a screen, whose eyes reflect artificial lights instead of letting their creativity shine.”

The Supreme Pontiff pointed out that “to be young is not to think of having the world in your hands, but to get your hands dirty for the world; it is to have a life ahead of you to spend, not to preserve or archive,” and that it saddened him to see “young people who are professional on the outside and lifeless on the inside, who, squeezed by duty, take refuge in the pursuit of pleasure.”

He warned that today a brief thought is spreading in the world “formed by a few characters, which burns immediately; a thought that does not look up and forward, but only here and now, fruit of the needs of the moment.”

It is “a thought that does not look at history, that does not have in itself a historic legacy; a thought that moves by instinct and is measured in instants,” the Pope asserted before the members of that association, founded in 2016, which brings together young people from the Fellowship Program in the Vatican’s representations to international organizations.

“Faced with the complexity of life and the world, this short-sighted thinking leads to generalization and criticism, to simplification and distortion of reality, in the pursuit of one’s own immediate interest rather than the good of others and the future of all,” the Bishop of Rome added.

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