WORLD 25/04/14 Education is a path to life

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Pope Francis reminds us that we stand before a great cultural, spiritual, and educational challenge

Children in a JRS school in Lebanon (Photo: Francesco Malavolta/Jesuit Refugee Service)

By Cardinal Michael Czerny SJ

Published: April 14, 2025 06:42 AM GMT

Updated: April 14, 2025 06:43 AM GMT

Refugees, vulnerable migrants and internally-displaced persons are individuals and communities forced to move by persecution, injustice, natural disasters, and war. This includes those whom poverty – indeed hopelessness – forces to seek a place where they, and especially their children, can truly live. In all these circumstances, despite all the challenges and obstacles, education can make the crucial difference: it can equip individuals to work for a better future for themselves, their families, their people, the societies in which they eventually settle and even those from which they come.

I belong to a migrant-refugee family; I was two and a half years of age when we fled Czechoslovakia and arrived in Canada. From my experience, I know that one loses a homeland and that one will never have another. One may approximate something akin to home, but there is always that residual reality that refuses to be collapsed into the present, that remainder that is forever the loss of culture, language, networks of relationships, ways of interacting with nature.

In brief, it is the loss of the world in which each of us first learns how to be a graced creation of God. Between avoiding assimilation and longing for meaningful integration, it is education that offers us a chance to regain some of what was lost by being forced to leave our communities of origin as well as to gain what is new.

In the long-term process of healing wounds caused by the direct and structural violence that marks forced displacement, and of learning how to forge life-giving hope amid an ever-increasing set of reasons to despair, education is the key.

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This article is brought to you by UCA News in association with "La Civiltà Cattolica."