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Every Salesian community, with the involvement of the whole of the EPC
and taking its inspiration from the preventive system, will draw up a Salesian Educative
and Pastoral Project (SEPP) to meet the needs of youth and working class areas and direct
every initiative towards evangelization (cf. R 4).
The SEPP is the historical mediation and practical instrument used in
all the countries and cultures of the same mission; it is the element of inculturation of
the charism (GC 24,5). In this sense the SEPP is :
the manifestation of the planning mentality which must guide the
development of the mission in the provinces and works;
the fruit of the reflection made together on the great doctrinal
principles which identify the Salesian mission (frame of reference), on the reading of
reality, on practical planning (primary educative and pastoral options as regards
objectives, strategies and criteria, programs of intervention, etc.), and on the process
of verification;
the guide of a process of growth lived by the provincial community
and the educative and pastoral community in their effort to embody the Salesian mission in
a particular context.
The primary objective of the SEPP is not only to produce a text to be
known and put into practice, but rather to help the province and the communities to work
with a shared mentality and with a clear understanding of aims and criteria so as to make
possible a shared responsibility in the management of pastoral processes.
The young person at the center
The center of this process (SEPP) is the young person
seen always in the totality of his/her dimensions (body, mind,
feelings and will), of his/her relationships (with himself /herself, with others, with the
world and with God), in the double perspective of the person and environment (collective
advancement, commitment for the transformation of society);
and seen also in the unity of his/her existential dynamism of human
growth leading to the encounter with the person of Jesus Christ, the perfect Man, finding
in him the supreme sense of our own existence.
For this reason the SEPP
directs and guides an educative process in which multiple
interventions and resources interact in the service of the gradual and integral
development of the young person;
indicates the practical objectives, strategic aspects and most
suitable lines of action for giving life to the values and attitudes of the plan of life
proposed by Salesian Youth Spirituality (SYS), and the methodological principles of
Salesian pedagogy (the preventive system).
Its community reality
Before its being a document, let us consider the SEPP as a mental
process of the community leading to involvement, clarification and identification, which
tends to:
generate in the EPC a practical convergence of views with respect to
common criteria, objectives and lines of action, thus avoiding the dispersion of our
efforts and rebuilding the synthesis and unity of educational activity;
bring about in the EPC a deeper knowledge of the common mission and a
common mentality;
to the extent that it becomes a shared point of reference for
educative and pastoral quality, which needs to be continually verified.
The SEPP therefore is an essential element of the EPC, and at the same
time the latter is both the subject and environment of educative and pastoral activity
(cf. R 5).
Its structural unit
The SEPP, as a helpful element of the Salesian Youth Ministry, must
express the latter’s structural unity in the different objectives, interventions and
actions mutually interrelated among themselves and all having the same aim, manifesting
their complementary nature in practice and forming a complete whole.
This structural unity is expressed in the four dimensions of the
SEPP (cf. C 32-37; R 6-9).
The educative and cultural dimension (R 6) and the dimension
of evangelization and catechesis (R 7), which develop the two fundamental aspects of
the person, his/her reality as a human being and his/her reality as a child of God
(citizen and Christian; educate by evangelizing and evangelize by educating).
The vocational dimension, which looks to the final objective
of the educative and evangelizing project, so as to respond with a responsible choice of
life in line with God’s plan (R 9).
The dimension of group experience, which characterizes our
style of education and evangelization through group activity, insertion in the locality,
the advancement and transformation of the environment through our style of animation (R
8).
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