An international Erasmus+ encounter between San Ignacio de Loyola School (Madrid) and Fondazione Sacro Cuore (Milan)
From 14th to 21st October, twenty-eight students aged 14 and five teachers from San Ignacio de Loyola School and the Fondazione Sacro Cuore of Milan took part in the Madrid encounter of the international project Bridges of Peace: Identity, Encounter and Mission in Europe. This seven-day encounter sought to help young people approach peace and forgiveness, not as an abstract idea but as a lived experience —personal, relational, social, and intercultural. Through workshops, cultural visits, artistic creation and shared life, the participants explored five central questions:
- How can I discover within my identity a gift for peace?
- What does it truly mean to encounter the other?
- How can forgiveness transform our relationships, and what is its link to peace?
- Can we build together an active and compassionate citizenship?
- Can art and beauty help us live peace more deeply?
The programme combined testimonies, social engagement, artistic workshops and cultural discoveries, inviting participants to live what they were learning and to transform ideas into experience. Every moment, from listening to shaping clay, from silent reflection to shared laughter, became part of a process of recognition and encounter.
Activities
- Testimony: The Human Face of Forgiveness. The encounter began with the moving testimony of Félix Arias, who shared his personal journey through pain, reconciliation and hope. His story offered a tangible example of forgiveness as a profoundly human path —not a theory, but a way of transforming wounds into new beginnings. Students were invited to reflect on their own experiences, discovering that peace is born in the heart of those who dare to forgive.
- Experience with a Social Organisation: FISC. A key moment of the week was the visit to the Fundación Internacional de Solidaridad Compañía de María (FISC), an NGO committed to education and development cooperation. Through dialogue and activities, participants discovered how peace also requires social structures of care, justice and participation. The students learned about FISC’s projects in La Cañada, Congo and Haiti, realising that peace grows wherever human dignity is protected and promoted. This encounter helped them move from empathy to concrete, responsible action —a crucial step in becoming builders of peace.
- Cultural Experience: The Prado Museum. Culture became a classroom for reflection through a guided visit to the Museo Nacional del Prado, one of the world’s great art galleries. The students focused on how art reveals humanity’s struggle for harmony, compassion and truth. In dialogue with beauty, they recognised that art can heal divisions and help us see the world —and one another— with new eyes.
- Workshop: The Forgiveness Institute (UFV). Peace, as the team from the Forgiveness Institute of Universidad Francisco de Vitoria reminded the group, begins within. Through reflection, dialogue and guided activities, participants explored the story of Tim Guenard and his process of forgiving and being forgiven —recognising their own strengths and limits, and understanding forgiveness not as weakness but as freedom. The session connected psychology together with philosophy, showing that inner reconciliation is the first step toward social peace.
- Workshop: Pottery and the Art of Patience. In the Pottery Workshop, clay became a metaphor for peace itself —fragile yet capable of being shaped with care, patience and collaboration. Working together, students moulded individual pieces that later formed part of a collective ceramic installation. Each gesture left a mark; each piece told a story of shared effort. The workshop offered a contemplative rhythm, teaching that peace, like art, is something we must tend to with time and love.
- Workshop: Performing Arts as a Language of Encounter. The Performing Arts Workshop invited students to express emotions, ideas and experiences through body, movement and voice. Guided by their teachers, participants devised a collective performance born from their own stories of encounter and forgiveness. Performing became an act of empathy and courage —a way to transform vulnerability into creativity and to turn silence into a shared voice for peace.
- Workshop: Dance Therapy and the Body in Harmony. Led by an expert from the European Association of Dance Movement Therapy and the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, the Dance Therapy Workshop offered an embodied approach to peace. Through guided movement, breathing and mindfulness, students learned to regulate tension, enhance awareness and inhabit the present moment with calm and openness. As one facilitator put it, “The body is not only a vehicle —it is also a source of knowledge and reconciliation.”
- Cultural Heritage: Discovering Madrid. Beyond workshops and testimonies, the encounter included visits to emblematic sites such as the Royal Palace, Puerta del Sol, Retiro Park and Plaza Mayor. These cultural experiences were not mere sightseeing tours, but opportunities to deepen the sense of identity and belonging within a shared European heritage. Through art, history and daily life, the students discovered that peace also grows from understanding the beauty of one’s own culture and that of others.
Final products
The week concluded with two final creations that symbolised the spirit of the entire encounter:
- Ceramic Installation. A collective artwork displaying the beauty of cooperation and the fragility of peace transformed into permanence. Installed in a public space, it stands as a silent teacher, reminding all that reconciliation is possible.
- Peace Performing Arts Short. A creative performance that united movement, music and voice, giving visible form to the invisible journey of forgiveness and encounter.
Both works express the conviction that peace is not an abstract concept but a shared experience made visible through art and community.
A Journey that continues
The Madrid encounter was the first chapter of a shared European journey that will continue in Milan. It offered, not only a space for learning but a living experience of peace —one that begins in the heart, grows in encounter, and becomes real when it is shaped, shared, and lived together.