 
Excerpts from
The Holy Father'sPro-Life Message For World Youth Day Continued (Page 3) The
Church needs your energies, your enthusiasm, your youthful ideals, in
order to make the Gospel
of Life penetrate the fabric of society, transforming people's hearts and the structures of society in order to create a civilisation of true justice and life. Now more than ever, in a world that is often without light and without the courage of noble ideals, people need the fresh, vital spirituality of the Gospel. Do not be afraid to go out on the streets and into public places, like the first Apostles who preached Christ and the good News of salvation in the squares of cities, towns and villages. This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel (cf. Rom 1: 16). It is the time to preach it from the rooftops (cf Mt 10:27). Do not be afraid to break out of comforable and routine modes of living, in order to take up the challenge of making Christ known in the modern "metropolis". It is you who must "go out into the byroads" (Mt 22:) and invite everyone you meet to the banquet which God has prepared for his people. The Gospel must not be kept hidden because of fear or indifference. It was never meant to be hidden away in private. It has to be put on a stand so that people may see its light and give praise to our Heavenly Father (cf Mt 5:15-16).(1) There is spreading too an anti-life mentality - an attitude of hostility to life in the womb and life in its last stages. Precisely when science and medicine are achieving a greater capacity to safeguard health and life, the threats against life are becoming more insidious. Abortion and euthanasia - the actual killing of another human being - are hailed as "rights and solutions to problems" - an individual's problem or society's. The slaughter of the innocents is no less sinful and devastating simply because it is done in a legal and scientific way. In the modern metropolis, life - God's first gift, and the fundamental right of every individual, on which all other rights are based - is often treated as just one more commodity to be organized, commercialised and manipulated according to convenience. All this happens while Christ, the Good Shepherd, wants us to "have life". He sees everything that threatens life. He sees the wolf coming to ravage and scatter the sheep. He sees all those who try to get in to the sheepfold but who are thieves and robbers (cf In 10: 1. 13). He sees so many young people throwing away their lives in a flight into irresponssibility and falsehood. Drug and alcohol abuse, pornography and sexual disorder, violence: these are grave social problems which call for a serious response from the whole of society, within each country and on the international level. But they are also personal tragedies and they need to be met with concrete interpersonal acts of love and solidarity in a great rebirth of the sense of personal answerability before God, before our own conscience. We are our brothers' keepers (cf Gen 4:9). |
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