Pope Francis’s Scholas Occurrentes comes to the Philippines
The late Pope Francis left more than just a good name when he passed away last year, in 2025. He left a living legacy through Scholas Occurrentes, the movement he started while still a cardinal in Argentina. Scholas Occurrentes has since spread throughout the world and is in 446,000 schools in 70 countries across four continents, with two and a half million participants. What is this movement all about, how did it happen, and why is it spreading so quickly?
To answer that, we have to recognize that we live in a world beset by wars that wreak terrible havoc on the planet. The ongoing conflicts between the United States and Iran and between Russia and Ukraine are examples of how war is disastrous for the rest of the world. Escalating oil prices due to the unpredictable status of the Strait of Hormuz, and, for a while, even a disruption in the supply of wheat, mean higher costs for food and other basic necessities. When a war breaks out, the whole world suffers.
‘Pope Francis wanted to bring young people from all walks of life and all faiths together in this movement,’ say Lito and Kim Camacho, who acceded to his dying wish.
The much-loved Pope Francis recognized this, saying, “War always marks the failure of peace; it is always a defeat for humanity.” But the Pope, while still a cardinal in Argentina, was already doing something about this in a very simple and practical manner. One time, bringing boys from different neighborhoods together, he could not get them to interact with each other until he produced a ball. That ball melted the differences away, and a simple game became a means for kids from different backgrounds to connect with each other.
This is the premise behind Scholas Occurrentes. We humans are divided by race, social status, religion, politics and more. But given a chance to connect with those whom we deem different from us, we discover that we are not that different after all. We all look with trepidation at an uncertain future, we are insecure about ourselves regardless of social standing, and we long for our voices to be heard. Scholas Occurrentes recognizes all this and provides a framework and funding for kids of all ages to come forward and forge relationships with each other, in the process discovering themselves as well.
To give a practical example, in the town of San Antonio de los Cobres in Salta, Argentina, suicide rates had climbed to alarming levels in 2016. In a place where people felt like they were going nowhere, everyone knew or was related to someone who had taken their own life, many of them jumping off one particular bridge. Scholas facilitators came up with the idea of providing paint so that the youth of the town could paint what was once a symbol of pain and defeat in vibrant colors, symbolizing hope and life. The suicides stopped.
to bring Scholas Occurrentes to the Philippines.
Incidents like this are what prompted young people like Delfina Bejar and Manu Giustino to devote their lives to Scholas Occurrentes. Personally trained by Pope Francis, they are here now in the Philippines to train a new batch of facilitators as Lito and Kim Camacho, answering a dying wish of the pope, assume leadership of Scholas Occurrentes in the Philippines.
Known here as the Schools of Encounter Foundation, Inc., the Camachos are devoting their time to establishing the vision of Pope Francis in a country that is visibly polarized by economic status and politics more than anything else. But as Manu explains, they do not research or predict what the problems of a country or a specific community are. Rather, they let the youth come forward and verbalize what they deem broken in their world.
Scholas has brought together Christians and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians by this simple means. “When Pope Francis put together this foundation, he wanted to put together people from all walks of life,” says Kim Camacho. “Catholics, Jewish, Muslims, people of no faith or atheists are brought together. This is not a Catholic program. Pope Francis wanted to bring together people of all faiths and ethnic groups.”
Lito Camacho says: “We are willing to open up our home for meetings to bring the movement forward.”
There is no attempt to fix the cause of the brokenness or division, but only opportunities for such groups to connect and discover how much they actually have in common. Humanity is a shared experience even as we are set apart by all the conditions of race and age, politics and religion, gender and social standing.
As Manu and Delfina set out to train Filipino facilitators to continue to bring forward Pope Francis’s vision, the Schools of Encounter Foundation, Inc. welcomes partners in media and education. Just as importantly, they need donors to keep this initiative growing. It has already made a huge difference around the globe, and you see this as you listen to testimonies of how Scholas Occurrentes has changed the lives of young people everywhere.
Ultimately, Scholas Occurrentes is a movement toward lasting peace. As we learn to recognize ourselves and others as not that different, regardless of what we deem divides us, simple encounters through art, sports, music, movies and more provide the connection that we need. We may never embrace each other’s point of view, but we can understand each other a little better. In this, the late Pope Francis sought to bring about peace in the world, one encounter and one person at a time.
