What Latin American Youth Are Really Hungry For — and Why Sicar Feeds It

Across Latin America, young people arrive at the Sicar retreat in a posture of active searching — for meaning, acceptance, a mission — and leave having received something most had not found elsewhere: the experience of being genuinely accompanied in their search.

Sicar takes its name from Sychar, the Samaritan town in John's Gospel where Jesus stops at a well and speaks at length with a woman not expecting to be addressed at all, let alone with honesty and care. The retreat grew from the spiritual discernment of Mother María Elena Martínez, a Mexican religious with over 30 years of consecrated life, who founded the private association of the faithful "Mary, Mother of Love" in Mexico in 2015. It now runs retreats in parishes, correctional facilities, and youth settings across Mexico, Guatemala, Paraguay, Argentina, and Peru.[^1]

The problem the retreat is answering

Young adults are the demographic majority in Latin America, and the bishops gathered at Aparecida in 2007 were precise about what that majority carries. Paragraph 443 of the Aparecida document names it directly: young people do not fear sacrifice or even the gift of their own lives, but they do fear una vida sin sentido, a life without meaning.[^2]

That fear has a measurable shape. Vitz and Faria, surveying the psychosocial profiles of mass school shooters, document a consistent pattern: the complete absence of positive, pro-social, or higher meaning in the young person's life, drawing in part on Argentine research into purpose-in-life deficits among adolescents.[^3] The authors connect this absence to rising rates of youth depression and point toward meaning-directed programs as the category of response that demonstrably increases pro-social orientation. Sicar is exactly that category of program, operating from a richer anthropological foundation than most.

A founder shaped by her own thirst

Mother Martínez did not design Sicar from a strategic plan. She told ACI Prensa that from childhood she felt "a great thirst for God," and that at 11 a desire for purity arose in her; she prayed insistently to the Virgin Mary for consecration. Her path through various forms of religious life, from the Missionaries of Charity to a contemplative cloister, was driven by a single complaint against each setting: she wanted something "more interior, deeper."[^4]

The soul's orientation toward transcendence is constitutive of human personhood, not a feature added to an otherwise self-sufficient psychology. Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est develops this through eros as ex-stasis, the movement out of oneself toward genuine goods, toward the other, and ultimately toward God — not primarily sexual, but the fascination that makes persons capable of love and communion at all. A young person arriving at Sicar is enacting the soul's constitutive reach toward something it recognizes as real.

Mother Martínez's own formation gave her a specific pastoral instinct: a retreat format reaches people that classroom instruction cannot, because it addresses the whole person, intellect, affect, imagination, will, in an integrated experience. Thomistic psychology distinguishes a habit, an automatic routine effective in predictable conditions, from a virtue, a flexible capacity that has formed the interior life of the person. Classroom catechesis, at its weakest, produces habits; encounter-based formation reaches toward virtue.[^5]

What actually happens inside

The structure of Sicar centers on testimony, communal prayer, and sustained personal attention that participants often say they have not experienced before. John Bowlby's attachment research, brought into family-law scholarship by Cochran and Vitz, holds that uncertainty about the accessibility of attachment figures is a principal condition for unstable, anxious personality, while confidence in their unfailing accessibility is the bedrock on which stable, self-reliant personality is built.[^6] The young adult who has not experienced that bedrock cannot simply be instructed into identity. She needs an environment that provides it.

Retreat leaders and older participants offer testimony from their own lives — a communal disclosure that positions the young person inside a story larger than her own uncertainty. Being heard, in that context, gives the person evidence that she is the kind of being whose interior life merits serious attention, which is what makes genuine internalization of values possible at all. Aparecida frames the same dynamic theologically: young people are sensitive to discovering their vocation as friends and disciples of Christ, capable of opposing the false promises of drugs, pleasure, and violence precisely in their search for meaning.[^2]

A spread that maps a need

From its origins in Mexico, Sicar has moved into Guatemala, Paraguay, Argentina, and Peru. That spread across five countries with distinct ecclesial cultures is not institutional momentum alone; it is carried by participants who found something they needed and brought it home. Monsignor James Shea, drawing on Aparecida, frames this as a change of the ages rather than an age of change, a time when pastoral strategies once adequate have become insufficient.[^5] Sicar takes the specific hunger of young adults seriously enough to build a residential, relational, sacramental experience around it, rather than reducing formation to content delivery.

Young people require a space where the search for meaning is treated as real, where the desire for God is recognized as constitutive rather than optional, and where belonging is provided rather than assumed. Sicar's reach across Latin America suggests the hunger was already widespread, and that one woman's decades of searching produced a response more portable than anyone planned.

References

[^1]: "Sicar: The Retreat Transforming the Lives of Young People in Latin America," EWTN News, July 19, 2026.

[^2]: Fifth General Conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops, Aparecida Concluding Document (CELAM, 2007), §443.

[^3]: Paul C. Vitz and Andre A. Faria, "The Absence of Positive Psychosocial Characteristics in the Lives of Mass School Shooters," Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology 37 (2020): 17–37.

[^4]: Diego López Marina, "Madre Elena y Sicar: El retiro que transforma la vida de miles de jóvenes en Latam," ACI Prensa, July 14, 2026.

[^5]: James Shea, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission (University of Mary Press, n.d.).

[^6]: Robert F. Cochran Jr. and Paul C. Vitz, "Child Protective Divorce Laws: A Response to the Effects of Parental Separation on Children," Family Law Quarterly 17, no. 3 (1983): 327–363, drawing on John Bowlby's attachment research. (The precise wording attributed to Bowlby via this secondary source has not been independently confirmed against Bowlby's own text.)