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Vatican City, 6th June 2006 (CNA) - The Church and
its teaching must be presented to the youth as a friend and not as an obstacle
to their freedom, Pope Benedict XVI said yesterday evening at the Basilica of
St. John Lateran in Rome.
The Holy Father inaugurated the diocesan ecclesial congress on Tuesday, which is
being held from June 5 to 8 on the theme: "The joy of faith and the education of
new generations."
“Educating new generations in the faith is a great and fundamentally important
task that involves the entire Christian community,” one that has become
“particularly difficult” today and, hence, is “even more important and urgent,”
the Pope said.
According to the Pontiff, the new generations must experience that the Church
“is a company of friends, one that is truly trustworthy and remains close in all
the moments and circumstances of life and that will never abandon us even in
death, because it carries in itself the promise of eternity.”
Young people and adolescents, the Pope went on, “must be disabused of the
widespread prejudice that Christianity, with its commandments and its
prohibitions, places too many obstacles to the joy of love, and in particular
that it prevents the full enjoyment of the happiness that man and woman find in
their mutual love.”
“The Ten Commandments are not a series of 'No', but a big 'Yes' to love and to
life,” the Pontiff stated.
“Human love,” he continued, “must be purified, it must mature and go beyond its
own limits in order to become truly human, to be the origin of true and lasting
joy, to respond to that demand for eternity it carries within itself and which
it cannot relinquish without betraying itself.”
Benedict XVI insisted that the issue of truth “must occupy a central position.”
In the faith, he said, “we welcome and accept the Truth that our minds cannot
fully understand, that they cannot posses." This "enables us to arrive at the
Mystery in which we are immersed and to rediscover in God the definitive meaning
of our existence.”
“In the extent to which we nourish ourselves from Christ and love Him, we also
feel within ourselves the stimulus to bring others to Him”.
“Indeed,” he continued, “we cannot keep the joy of the faith to ourselves, we
must transmit it.”
“This need becomes even stronger and more impelling in the presence of that
strange forgetfulness of God that exists today in vast areas of the world,” he
said in conclusion.
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