| The joy of faith and the education of the new
generations On Monday evening, 5 June, in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the
Holy Father spoke to participants in the Ecclesial Convention of the
Diocese of Rome, whose theme was: "The joy of faith and the education of
the new generations". The Pope urged his listeners to extend the City
Mission begun 10 years ago by Pope John Paul II, which in recent years has
focused on the family. "The priority we are now giving to the education in
the faith of the new generations does not mean that we are abandoning our
commitment to the family", primarily responsible for education, the Pope
emphasized. The following is a translation of the Holy Father's Address,
which was given in Italian.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
I am pleased to be with you once again to introduce with my Reflection
our Diocesan Convention, which is dedicated to a theme of great beauty and
paramount pastoral importance: the joy that derives from faith and its
relationship with the education of the new generations.
Thus, in a perspective that more directly concerns the young, we are
returning to and further developing the subject we began discussing a year
ago on the occasion of the previous Diocesan Convention. We then focused
on the role of the family and of the Christian community in the formation
of the person and the transmission of faith.
I greet each one of you with affection, Bishops, priests, deacons, men
and women religious and lay people engaged in witnessing to our faith. In
particular, I greet you young people who are planning to combine the
process of your personal formation with taking on ecclesial and missionary
responsibility for other young people and children. I warmly thank the
Cardinal Vicar for his words on behalf of you all.
Extending the City Mission
With this Convention and with the pastoral year that will be inspired
by its content the Diocese of Rome is journeying on through the long
period that began 10 years ago now with the City Mission desired by John
Paul II, my beloved Predecessor.
Actually, its goal is still the same: to revive the faith in our
communities and seek to reawaken or inspire it in all the individuals and
families of this great city, where the faith was preached and the Church
already established by the first generation of Christians, and the
Apostles Peter and Paul in particular.
In the past three years you have focused your attention especially on
the family in order to consolidate this fundamental human reality with the
Gospel truth today, unfortunately,
seriously undermined and threatened and to help it carry out its
indispensable mission in the Church and in society.
The priority we are now giving to the
education in the faith of the new generations does not mean that we are
abandoning our commitment to the family, which is primarily responsible
for education.
Rather, we are responding to the
widespread concern of many believing families, who fear, in today's
social and cultural context, that they might not succeed in passing on to their
children the precious heritage of the faith.
In fact, discovering the beauty and joy of
faith is a path that every new generation must take on its own, for all
that we have that is most our own and most intimate is staked on faith:
our heart, our mind, our freedom, in deeply personal relationship with the
Lord at work within us.
Just as radically, however, faith is a
community act and attitude; it is the "we believe" of the Church.
Thus, the joy of faith is a joy shared: as
the Apostle John says: "that which we have seen and heard [the Word of
life] we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us....
And we are writing this that our joy may be complete" (I Jn 3:4).
Consequently, educating the new
generations in the faith is an important and fundamental task that
involves the entire Christian community.
Dear brothers and sisters, today you have
experienced how various aspects of this educational task have become very
difficult, but for this very reason it is even more important and
especially urgent.
Indeed, it is possible to identify two
basic lines of our current secularized society that are clearly
interdependent. They impel people to move away from the Christian
proclamation and cannot but have an effect on those whose inclinations and
choices of life are developing.
One of these is agnosticism, which derives
from the reduction of human intelligence to a mere practical mechanism
that tends to stifle the religious sense engraved in the depths of our
nature.
The other is the process of relativization
and uprooting, which corrodes the most sacred bonds and most worthy
affections of the human being, with the result that people are debilitated
and our reciprocal relations rendered precarious and unstable.
It is in this very situation that all of
us, and especially our children, adolescents and young people, need to
live faith as joy and to savour that profound tranquility to which the
encounter with the Lord gives rise.
Certainty of God's love
In the Encyclical Deus Caritas Est,
I wrote: "We have come to believe in God's love: in these word the
Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being
Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the
encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a
decisive direction" (n.1).
The source of Christian joy is the
certainty of being loved by God, loved personally by our Creator, by the
One who holds the entire universe in his hands and loves each one of us
and the whole great human family with a passionate and faithful love, a
love greater than our infidelities and sins, a love which forgives.
This love "is so great that it turns God
against himself", as appears definitively in the mystery of the Cross: "So
great is God's love for man that by becoming man he follows him even into
death, and so reconciles justice and love" (Deus Caritas Est, n.
10).
Dear brothers and sisters, this certitude
and this joy of being loved by God must be conveyed in some palpable and
practical way to each one of us, and especially to the young generations
who are entering the world of faith. In other words: Jesus said he was the
"Way" that leads to the Father, as well as the "Truth" and the "Life" (cf.
Jn 14:5-7).
Thus, the question is: how can our
children and young people, practically and existentially, find in him this
path of salvation and joy? This is precisely the great mission for which
the Church exists as the family of God and the company of friends into
which we are already integrated with Baptism as tiny children , in which
our faith and joy and the certainty of being loved by the Lord must grow.
It is therefore indispensable and this
is the task entrusted to Christian families, priests, catechists and
educators, to young people themselves among their peers and to our
parishes, associations and movements, and lastly to the entire diocesan
community that the new generations experience the Church as a company of
friends who are truly dependable and close in all life's moments and
circumstances, whether joyful and gratifying or arduous and obscure; as a
company that will never fail us, not even in death, for it carries within
it the promise of eternity.
Dear children and young people of Rome, I
would like to ask you in turn to entrust yourselves to the Church and to
love and trust her, because in her the Lord is present and because she
seeks nothing but your true good.
Love gives birth to love
Anyone who knows he is loved is in turn
prompted to love. It is the Lord himself, who loved us first, who asks us
to place at the centre of our lives love for him and for the people he has
loved.
It is especially adolescents and young
people, who feel within them the pressing call to love, who need to be
freed from the widespread prejudice that Christianity, with its
commandments and prohibitions, sets too many obstacles in the path of the
joy of love and, in particular, prevents people from fully enjoying the
happiness that men and women find in their love for one another.
On the contrary, Christian faith and
ethics do not wish to stifle love but to make it healthy, strong and truly
free: this is the exact meaning of the Ten Commandments, which are not a
series of "noes" but a great "yes" to love and to life.
Human love, in fact, needs to be purified,
to mature and also to surpass itself if it is to be able to become fully
human, to be the beginning of true and lasting joy, to respond, that is,
to the question of eternity which it bears within it and which it cannot
renounce without betraying itself.
This is the principal reason why love
between a man and a woman is only completely fulfilled in marriage.
Essential aspects of love
In all educational work in the formation
of the person and of the Christian, we must not shelve the important issue
of love through fear or embarrassment: were we to do so, we would present
a disembodied Christianity that could not seriously interest the young
person who is opening himself or herself to life.
Yet we must also introduce this young
person to the integral dimension of Christian love, where love for God and
love for man are indissolubly united, and where love of neighbour is a
particularly concrete commitment.
Christians cannot be satisfied with words
or deceptive ideologies but must go to meet the needs of their brethren,
truly offering themselves without being content with some sporadic good
deed.
Proposing to children a practical
experience of service to their needier neighbour is therefore part of an
authentic and complete education in faith.
Together with the need to love, the desire
for truth is inherent in the human being's very nature.
Therefore, in the education of the new
generations, the question of the truth can certainly not be avoided: on
the contrary, it must have a central position.
By asking the question about the truth, we
are in fact broadening the horizon of our rationality, we are beginning to
free reason from those excessively narrow boundaries that confine it when
we consider as rational only what can be the object of experimentation or
calculation.
It is here that the encounter between
reason and faith takes place. In fact, through faith we accept the gift
that God makes of himself in revealing himself to us, creatures made in
his image. We welcome and accept that Truth which our minds cannot fully
comprehend or possess but which, for this very reason, extends the horizon
of our knowledge and enables us to arrive at the Mystery in which we are
immersed, and to find in God the definitive meaning of our lives.
Bond with Jesus Christ
Dear friends, we know well that it is not
easy to agree to overcome the limits of our reason in this way. Faith,
therefore, which is a very personal human act, remains a choice of our
freedom which can also be rejected.
Here, however, a second dimension of faith
comes to light, the entrustment of oneself to a person, not just any
person but Jesus Christ, and to the Father who sent him.
Believing means creating a very personal
bond with our Creator and Redeemer, by virtue of the Holy Spirit who works
in our hearts, and making this bond the foundation of our whole lives.
Indeed, Jesus Christ "is the Personified
Truth who attracts the world to himself.... Every other truth is a
fragment of the Truth that he is, and refers to him" (Address to the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 10 February 2006;
L'Osservatore Romano English edition, 22 February 2006, p. 3).
Thus, he fills our hearts, enlarging and
overwhelming them with joy, extending our minds toward unexplored
horizons, offering our freedom its crucial reference point, uplifting it
from the narrowness of selfishness and making it capable of authentic
love.
Faith and reason
In educating the new generations,
therefore, we must not have any fears about confronting the truth of the
faith with the authentic conquests of human knowledge. Science is making
very rapid progress today and all too often this is presented as being in
contradiction to the affirmations of faith, causing confusion and making
the acceptance of the Christian truth more difficult.
But Jesus Christ is and remains the Lord
of all creation and of all history: "All things were created through him
and for him... in him all things hold together" (Col 1:16, 17).
Therefore, if the dialogue between faith
and reason is conducted with sincerity and exactness, it offers a
possibility of perceiving more effectively and more convincingly the
reasonableness of faith in God not just in any God but in that God who
revealed himself in Jesus Christ , and likewise of showing that every
authentic human aspiration is fulfilled in Jesus Christ himself.
Dear young people of Rome, press forward,
therefore, with trust and courage on the way of the search for the truth.
And you, dear priests and educators, do not hesitate to promote a true and
proper "pastoral care of the mind" and more widely, of the person that
takes young peoples' questions seriously, both existential questions and
those that arise from comparison with the forms of rationality widespread
today, in order to help them find valid and pertinent Christian answers,
and lastly, to make their own that decisive response which is Christ the
Lord.
The place of prayer
We have spoken of faith as an encounter
with the One who is Truth and Love. We have also seen that this is an
encounter which is both communitarian and personal, and must take place in
all the dimensions of our lives through the exercise of our intelligence,
the choices of freedom, the service of love.
A privileged place exists, however, where
this encounter takes place more directly. Here it is reinforced and
deepened and thus can truly permeate and mark the whole of life: this
space is prayer.
Dear young people, I am sure that many of
you were present at the World Youth Day in Cologne. There, together, we
prayed to the Lord, we adored him present in the Eucharist, we offered his
Holy Sacrifice.
We meditated on that decisive act of love
with which Jesus at the Last Supper anticipated his own death, accepted it
in his inmost depths and transformed it into an action of love, into that
unique revolution which can truly renew the world and liberate humanity,
overcoming the power of sin and death. I ask you young people and all of
you who are here, dear brothers and sisters, I ask the whole of the
beloved Church of Rome, in particular consecrated souls especially in the
cloistered monasteries, to be assiduous in prayer, spiritually united with
Mary our Mother, to worship Christ alive in the Eucharist, to fall ever
more deeply in love with him. He is our brother and our true friend, the
Church's Bridegroom, the faithful and merciful God who loved us first.
Thus, you young people will be ready and
willing to answer his call if he wants you entirely for himself in the
priesthood or consecrated life.
To the extent that we nourish ourselves on
Christ and are in love with him, we feel within us the incentive to bring
others to him: indeed, we cannot keep the joy of the faith to ourselves;
we must pass it on.
This need becomes even stronger and more
pressing in the context of that strange forgetfulness of God which has
spread in vast areas of the world today and to a certain extent also
exists here in Rome. This forgetfulness is giving rise to a lot of
fleeting chatter, to may useless arguments, but also to great
dissatisfaction and a sense of emptiness.
Therefore, dear brothers and sisters, in
our humble service as witnesses and missionaries of the living God, we
must be everywhere messengers of that hope which is born from the
certitude of faith: we will thus help our brethren and our fellow citizens
to rediscover the meaning and joy of their own lives.
I know that you are working with
dedication in the beloved contexts of pastoral care: I am delighted, and I
thank the Lord with you.
In the first year of my Pontificate, I
have been able in particular to experience and appreciate the liveliness
of the Christian presence among the young people and university students
of Rome, and among the children receiving First Communion. I ask you to
continue with trust, ever deepening your bond with the Lord, hence, making
your apostolate more and more effective.
In this commitment, do not overlook any of
life's dimensions, because Christ has come to save the world of the
person, in the intimacy of consciences as well as in the expressions of
culture and social relations.
Dear brothers and sisters, I entrust these
reflections to you with a friendly heart, as a contribution to your work
during the evenings of the Convention and then during the coming Pastoral
Year. May my affection and Blessing accompany you, today and in the
future.
Thank you for your attention!
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