Gioventù Studentesca

Gioventù Studentesca (“Student Youth” or GS, for short) is one of the two youth groups sponsored by the parishes of the city of Steubenville for high school-aged youth. We meet on Sundays from 5:00-6:15 p.m. in the Marian Room (202 Rosemont Ave.), next door and to the left of the front entrance to Holy Rosary Church.

GS is the high school part of the Catholic movement Communion & Liberation and refers to an international group of students who seek to understand how to live the particulars of our faith within all the various aspects of daily life. Throughout the school year, we go on hikes, attend classical music concerts, help to organize the largest Catholic cultural festival in Pittsburgh, travel to New York City, do charitable work together with the TOR Sisters, take vacations in New England, watch films, and study together. GS began in the friendship that sprang up among Fr. Luigi Giussani and a group of students in the Berchet high school in Milan, Italy; now, fifty years later, that friendship has spread throughout the world to 70 countries, including the United States, where GS groups exist in numerous cities and towns.  Our weekly meetings involve prayer, song, the reading and discussion of texts by Fr. Giussani, the viewing and discussion of movies and other cultural activities, occasional shared meals, and charitable work. There is no “sign up” or “membership card” for GS.

As Fr. Giussani himself put it, “We call students who call themselves Christians and those who want to decide whether or not to remain Christians, to judge Christianity objectively….We tell students that in order to understand Christianity, in order to judge it, you have to get together and try it, and see how life, with all of its interests, when approached from the Christian point of view can be… ‘made the most of.’”

For more information, please call Suzanne Lewis (740) 424-6382 or email:  gs.ohiovalley@gmail.com