Vatican City, 1 March 2014 (VIS) –
During his audience with the participants in the plenary assembly of
the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, which took place
yesterday, 28 February, Pope Francis gave an off the cuff address to
those present, a summary of which is given below.
“The transmission of faith, and
educational emergency. … If there is an educational emergency in
relation to the transmission of faith, it is how to approach the
theme of catechesis for the young from the perspective of fundamental
theology. That is, the issue of the anthropological assumptions that
affect the transmission of faith nowadays, and that create this
educational emergency for the young people of Latin America”.
“The first issue regarding education
is that to educate involves three dimensions: the transmission of
knowledge, habits and a sense of values – these three aspects
together. To transmit faith, it is necessary to create the habit of a
certain type of conduct. … If we want to transmit only the content
of faith, then it will be something superficial or ideological,
without roots. … It is important to transmit to the young … the
good management of utopia. In Latin America, we have had experience
of a not entirely balanced management of utopian ideals which in some
places, although not all, and at certain moments, has overwhelmed us.
At least in the case of Argentina, we can say that many young people
in Catholic Action, as a result of a poor education in managing the
concept of utopia, ended up participating in guerilla conflicts in
the 1970s. … To know how to guide and help the growth of youthful
utopia is a wealth. A youth without utopia ages prematurely, is old
before his time. How can we ensure that this desire typical of youth,
this desire for utopia, leads to an encounter with Jesus Christ? It
is a path we need to take”.
“Youthful utopia grows well when it
is accompanied by memory and discernment. Utopia looks to the future,
memory looks to the past, and the present is discerned. Young people
need to receive memory and plant or root their utopia in this memory.
… This brings us to my insistence … on the encounter between the
elderly and the young. … Some bishops from various countries in
crisis, where there are high levels of unemployment among the young,
have told me that part of the solution for the young rests in the
fact that they now keep their grandparents company. They have started
to meet with their grandparents again, their grandparents are
pensioners and so they come out of their rest homes and return to
their families, bringing with them their memory; this encounter. …
This phenomenon of the encounter between children and young people
and their grandparents has preserved faith in the countries of the
East, during the entire Communist era, because their parents could
not go to Church. ...The encounter between children and young people
and their grandparents is crucial for receiving the memory of a
people and discernment of the present: to be teachers of discernment,
spiritual advisers. And here we see the importance, for the
transmission of faith to the young, of the “face to face”
apostolate. Discernment of the present cannot be done without a good
confessor, a good spiritual guide who has the patience to spend hours
and hours listening to the young”.
“As a educational emergency, in this
transmission of faith and also of culture, the problem is our
throwaway culture. Nowadays, on account of the economic system that
has taken root in the world, which has at its centre the god of money
and not the human person, everything is ordered according to this
logic, and anything that does not fit within this order is discarded.
Children are discarded, when their existence is troublesome or
unwanted. The Spanish bishops recently spoke to me about the number
of abortions, and I was left speechless. … In some Latin American
countries there is hidden euthanasia … because the social
authorities will pay only up to a certain point, after which the
elderly have to get by as best they can”.
“Nowadays, how inconvenient it is to
this worldwide system to consider the number of young people to whom
it is necessary to provide work … there is a high percentage of
unemployed among the young. We are creating a generation of young
people who do not have the experience of dignity. The problem is not
that they have nothing to eat – their grandparents provide for
them, or their parishes, or the welfare state. … They have bread to
eat, but they do not have the dignity of earning bread and bringing
it home to the table”.
“Within this throwaway culture, we
see young people who need us more than ever – not only for that
utopia they have, because a young person without work has an
anaesthetised sense of utopia, or is at the point of losing it –
not only for this, but also for the urgency of transmitting faith to
a youth that has itself now too become waste material. And drugs
enter into this waste material. It is not a question of vice, there
are many forms of addiction. As in all periods of change, there are
strange phenomena including the proliferation of addictions;
ludomania, or compulsive gambling, for instance, has reached
extremely high levels. But drugs are an instrument of death among the
young”.
“We are discarding our young. What
does the future hold? An obligation: the 'traditio fe' is also
'traditio spei', and we must achieve this. The final question I wish
to put to you is this: when utopia falls to disenchantment, what can
we do? The utopia of today's enthusiastic youth is slipping away
towards disenchantment. Disenchanted youth, to whom we must give
faith and hope”.
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