The Road From Regensburg
FAITH Magazine September – October 2011
Calling Young People to Purity: Not Wanted?
20 August 2011
Below are some words that the Pope intended to deliver to one and a half million young Catholics at the Madrid World Youth Day Vigil. He was prevented by a violent storm that engulfed the site for twenty minutes just as he was getting into his stride. As one can see this stopped him publicly contradicting the Spanish redefinition of the family. It also caused some significant injuries, and, it seems, separated some children from their families. Lightening struck one tented chapel and lifted at least one other large tent into the air where it struck a pilgrim on the head. For this reason the police restricted the use of these tents for Holy Mass during the night and thus prevented the consecration of hosts to be used in the distribution of Holy Communion during the Papal Mass thefollowing morning.
Nowadays, although the dominant culture of relativism all around us has given up on the search for truth, even if it is the highest aspiration of the human spirit, we need to speak with courage and humility of the universal significance of Christ as the Saviour of humanity and the source of hope for our lives.... Dear friends, may no adversity paralyse you. Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, his name will continue to resound throughout the world.
During this prayer vigil, I urge you to ask God to help you find your vocation ... The Lord calls many people to marriage, in which a man and a woman, in becoming one flesh (cf.Gen 2:24), find fulfilment in a profound life of communion. It is a prospect that is both bright and demanding. It is a project for true love which is daily renewed and deepened by sharing joys and sorrows, one marked by complete self-giving. For this reason, to acknowledge the beauty and goodness of marriage is to realise that only a setting of fidelity and indissolubility, along with openness to God's gift of life, is adequate to the grandeur and dignity of marital love.
Science and its Philosophy are Important
20 July 2011
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelisation, spoke as part of a Madrid conference preparing for World Youth Day on the theme: "Young People and the Catholic Church: Points for a Youth Ministry for Today," at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.
One must "speak of liberty, as the youth of today has placed it in his culture, but liberty must always be in relation to truth, as it is truth that produces liberty ... [and] one cannot speak of God to young people without knowing the culture of today's young people, which is scientific. Today's culture, its content, is full of axioms of science ... the interaction of science, personal life and ethics is necessary... true science puts you at the doors of the transcendent."
