The Pope’s diagnosis of parish numbers echoes familiar concerns about European secularization, yet his tone avoids resignation.
“The hours devoted to catechesis are never wasted, even when participants are few,” writes Pope Leo XIV, responding to the quiet discouragement of a Swiss catechist wondering where the young have gone.
Each month, Piazza San Pietro continues a practice begun under Pope Francis: publishing a letter from the Bishop of Rome in response to a reader’s question. The January 2026 issue carries the voice of Nunzia, a 50-year-old catechist from Laufenburg, Switzerland, a small border town of just 620 residents.
Nunzia has spent a decade accompanying children from First Communion to Confirmation. She speaks warmly of her training and her love for teaching the faith. Yet her letter is marked by fatigue.
“I sow,” she writes, “but the young shoots struggle to grow.” Sports, parties, and packed weekends pull families away, while Sunday Mass increasingly gathers only the elderly.
Her discouragement is sharpened by contrast. Watching the Jubilee celebrations on television, she saw millions of young people and families flood Rome, visibly alive in their faith. “And here?” she asks. “Nothing.”
She asks the Pope for prayer — for the young entrusted to her, and for herself, that courage will not fail.
Members of a family
Leo XIV’s reply widens the lens. The situation Nunzia describes, he says, is shared by many countries with long Christian histories. Numbers matter, but they are not the heart of the problem. What is eroding more deeply is a sense of belonging — the awareness of being Church, “living members of the Body of Christ,” rather than occasional consumers of religious services.
The Pope’s diagnosis echoes familiar concerns about European secularization, yet his tone avoids resignation. Conversion, he insists, is never a private project.
“As Christians, we always need conversion,” he writes, “and what matters is to seek it together — to become holy together, in families and in communities.”
The recent closing of the Jubilee’s Holy Doors does not mean the time of grace has ended. The “true Door,” Leo XIV reminds her, remains open: the heart of Christ.
From there flows a vocation not to strategies or slogans, but to witness. Christ, he says, continues to place in every human heart a desire for goodness and truth, even when faith seems dormant.
For Nunzia, and for countless catechists like her, the Pope’s message is clear: fidelity is not measured by crowds, but by love patiently offered, again and again.
