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Representatives from Latin America open a dialogue on drugs in Rome
From 25 to 27 August, representatives from Latin America and the Caribbean, together with participants with experience from Asia, Africa and Europe, are meeting to discuss prevention, recovery and social integration, and to put forward a response based on community, faith and shared responsibility in addressing addiction and the criminal recruitment of young people.
By Sebastián Sansón Ferrari
We are not simply about talking about drugs. Nor are we talking just about those who use them. In the Vatican, the international dialogue on a faith-based response to drugs and the criminal recruitment of young people has raised a deeper question: what kind of communities are needed so that adolescents and young people can find belonging, care, dignity and a sense of purpose before others step in to fill that role?
From 25 to 27 August, representatives from Latin America and the Caribbean, together with participants from Asia, Africa and Europe, are taking part in the meeting “Faith-Based Response to Drugs and the Criminal Recruitment of Young People: A Dialogue from Latin America and the Caribbean to the World.”
The event is promoted by the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council’s (CELAM) Latin American Ministry for Accompaniment and Prevention of Addictions (PLAPA), the Pontifical Commission for Latin America (CAL), and the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) of the OAS. Using the methodology of Conversations in the Spirit, the meeting creates spaces for listening, reflection, resonance and collective discernment in order to identify common challenges and possible responses. The congress will conclude with an audience with the Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, to whom the participants will present the conclusions of the event.
The initiative has its roots in an experience that began in Argentina when Jorge Mario Bergoglio was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. The Familia Grande del Hogar de Cristo offered help to young people affected by addiction and accompanied them in their social reintegration. From there, the experience began to spread throughout Latin America and subsequently developed into a partnership with the OAS. The result of this process is an accompaniment method that now seeks to broaden its reach through a collectively developed handbook.
One of the moments of the meeting, led by Father Carlos Olivero
For Emilce Cuda, Secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, the key point is understanding that recovery does not end when a person stops using drugs. The challenge is to prevent relapse and rebuild the relationships that make it possible to live once again as part of a community.
“What saves is the family,” she explains. When someone is struggling with addiction, their own family may often regard them as ill, punish them or feel ashamed of them. For this reason, the “method” seeks to ensure that accompaniment centres can also become a family for those who have lost their own. A second dimension then emerges: social integration. Rebuilding trust and self-esteem, acquiring skills and gaining access to employment are all part of the same process because, as Cuda stresses, work helps reaffirm a person’s dignity.
The difference between this and other approaches does not lie in denying the contribution of medicine or science, but in adding another dimension. The method being presented in Rome is defined as a faith-based response—it begins by approaching the person, earning their trust, standing alongside them and accompanying them within a community.
“The Church has to understand that this concerns her”
Father Carlos Olivero, coordinator of the Ecclesial Network of Organized Communities (RECOR) of CELAM, of which PLAPA is a part, frames the challenge from a pastoral perspective. The Church, he argues, is called to be the “family of those who are most broken,” of those who have been “left by the roadside,” and to care for young people so that they are not taken away from her.
For Father Olivero, one of the main obstacles to overcome is the idea that addiction is exclusively a matter for specialists. Neuroscientists, psychologists and psychiatrists naturally have a fundamental role to play. But the Church has another role: to be a community, to embrace life and to accompany it.
In his words, the challenge requires a “pastoral conversion”: understanding that the Gospel is not limited to worship or morality, but touches every dimension of human existence, including the way communities are organized.
A second word also runs through his reflection: synodality.
“No one is saved alone,” he repeats. A parish that discovers that young people who once attended its catechism classes are using drugs or have even been recruited by criminal groups needs other organizations, communities and experiences in order to respond. Walking together, learning from one another and supporting one another increases the ability to address a reality that no single actor can resolve alone.
PLAPA’s handbook, developed through a process involving more than 300 people from 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, aims precisely to provide a common language and framework. Father Olivero sees it both as an end point and a starting point: a broad map bringing together spiritual, ecclesial, community, psychological and neurobiological dimensions so that those working in different territories can move in the same direction.
The goal is also to update an earlier resource. In 2001, the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers presented the handbook Church, Drugs and Drug Addiction. The Latin American initiative now seeks to launch a process of updating and adding an international perspective that can provide practical tools for addressing a reality that has changed.
Peace is built with everyone
From Mexico, Ana Paula Hernández Romano, national coordinator of the National Dialogue for Peace, brings to the meeting a conviction that runs throughout the initiative: no one can delegate to others the responsibility of creating conditions that protect young people.
The Church must assume its responsibility; the government must assume its own; mothers and fathers theirs; universities and businesses also have a role to play. All sectors must participate “in a spirit of shared responsibility,” she argues.
In a country marked by violence and drug trafficking, building peace and protecting young people cannot be conceived as isolated interventions. They are, Hernández Romano says, a “long-distance race.”
For this reason, she considers it particularly valuable that the Rome meeting could generate lasting regional ties, with regular meetings and concrete objectives. Identifying individual, family, community and structural risk factors and then developing common responses emerges as one possible path forward.
The Mexican experience began as a synodal process within the Church and grew through its ability to build links with other sectors. This openness, Hernández Romano says, enables the Church to have a stronger impact on reality.
From drugs to recruitment: The territory as the key
The perspective of Jimena Kalawski, head of the Drug Demand Reduction Unit at the OAS’s CICAD, places the dialogue within a process that began years ago. Since 2018, the OAS and Church representatives have been developing a partnership that has led to training materials and a course implemented in 14 countries across the region.
The point of convergence is the local community.
Communities can reach people and families who are often beyond the reach of government services. Hence the importance of strengthening networks that combine technical expertise with community-based support, as well as dialogue between faith and science.
But the challenge has grown. The discussion is no longer limited to substance use, but also encompasses the mechanisms through which criminal organizations target the most vulnerable.
Drug-trafficking groups, Kalawski explains, tend to target people exposed to risk factors similar to those associated with substance-use problems. In areas affected by violence or displacement, children and young people need a safe place and a sense of belonging. Organized crime can initially present itself as just that: an offer of protection, care, money or a better life. Later, leaving can become a matter of survival.
That is why the response, she insists, requires community. It also requires presence: being where those who are suffering are, knowing the realities of each territory firsthand, and placing available personal, spiritual and professional resources at their service.
Communities can reach people and families who are often beyond the reach of government services.
A priest who experienced addiction firsthand
Among the testimonies heard in Rome, that of Father Roberto Delacruz introduces a particularly personal dimension. A priest of the Archdiocese of Manila in the Philippines and head of Sanlakbay—“One Journey”—a community-based program supporting people with substance dependence, he knows addiction from more than just a pastoral perspective.
Before his conversion, he himself was involved in drug use and trafficking. He was imprisoned several times and went through various rehabilitation programs. The experience taught him to look at people struggling with addiction differently—with empathy.
Sanlakbay was founded in 2016, amid the violent anti-drug campaign then underway in the Philippines. Faced with the large number of people turning themselves in to the authorities, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle asked Father Delacruz to establish a community-based program. His own story was behind that decision.
He believes that faith can play a fundamental role in genuine transformation. He is not referring simply to giving up a substance, but to changing the way one sees God, others and oneself.
Father Delacruz was the same person before and after his conversion. What changed, he explains, was his “mindset”, the way he looked at God and at other people. After multiple attempts at rehabilitation, he found in an experience centered on knowing God, understanding his own identity and recognizing human dignity a possibility for change that previous treatments had failed to produce.
His conclusion is simple, yet demanding—collaboration and communion can save lives. Saving a person with an addiction also means saving their family and, ultimately, helping to save society.
“We have to leave our own spaces”
From Italy, Simone Feder brings to the meeting ten years of experience working with young people and others affected by addiction at Casa del Giovane in Pavia. His conclusion comes from a concrete reality: it is no longer enough to wait for people to come to treatment centers.
He explains that we have to step outside. We must go out to meet those who experience suffering in the so-called “non-places,” where institutional responses often fail to reach. Our presence must be professional, but also human—a form of listening that, in his words, “comes from the heart.”
Feder’s work began in 2017, after his daughter made an observation. She asked him why, after working with addiction for so many years, he had never gone to see what was happening in the area near their home. Feder did so. He found young people heading into the woods as if towards a “sanctuary of despair.” They were not going to university or school, but to a place where drugs were readily available, even for small amounts of money.
But behind that scenes, he found something even deeper: loneliness and despair. As he returns from Rome, Feder takes away a concrete task—to connect the knowledge, expertise, difficulties and opportunities of different territories and to give a voice to those who have none. It means being present in the places where young people risk becoming lost and working with families so that the entire community becomes an “educating community.”
Prevention begins at home
From Brazil, Denise Ferreira, national coordinator of the Pastoral for Sobriety, emphasizes another decisive territory: the home.
The Brazilian Church has an extensive network of volunteers and communities capable of reaching the outskirts of cities, major urban centres and rural areas alike. This widespread presence, she argues, is one of the great strengths of preventive action.
But prevention does not necessarily begin in a specialized institution. It can begin with three seemingly simple questions within the family: Where is your child? Who are they with? And what are they doing?
Dialogue and family life create a safe environment. And when young people find security, trust and acceptance within their own families, there is less room for a criminal group presenting itself as an alternative source of belonging. Ferreira also believes that criminal recruitment must cease to be an issue reserved for pastoral ministries working directly with addiction. It must also become part of catechesis, family ministry and other areas of Church life. What is needed, she argues, is a specific strategy to prevent it.
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