Vatican City, 6 February 2014 (VIS) –
We publish below the full text of the message the Holy Father has
sent to the young people preparing for the 29th World Youth Day 2014,
which will take as its theme: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven”.
“Dear Young Friends,
How vividly I recall the remarkable
meeting we had in Rio de Janeiro for the Twenty-eighth World Youth
Day. It was a great celebration of faith and fellowship! The
wonderful people of Brazil welcomed us with open arms, like the
statue of Christ the Redeemer which looks down from the hill of
Corcovado over the magnificent expanse of Copacabana beach. There,
on the seashore, Jesus renewed his call to each one of us to become
his missionary disciples. May we perceive this call as the most
important thing in our lives and share this gift with others, those
near and far, even to the distant geographical and existential
peripheries of our world.
The next stop on our intercontinental
youth pilgrimage will be in Krakow in 2016. As a way of accompanying
our journey together, for the next three years I would like to
reflect with you on the Beatitudes found in the Gospel of Saint
Matthew. This year we will begin by reflecting on the first
Beatitude: 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven'. For 2015 I suggest: 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for
they shall see God'. Then, in 2016, our theme will be: 'Blessed are
the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy'.
1. The revolutionary power of the
Beatitudes
It is always a joyful experience for us
to read and reflect on the Beatitudes! Jesus proclaimed them in his
first great sermon, preached on the shore of the sea of Galilee.
There was a very large crowd, so Jesus went up on the mountain to
teach his disciples. That is why it is known as 'the Sermon on the
Mount'. In the Bible, the mountain is regarded as a place where God
reveals himself. Jesus, by preaching on the mount, reveals himself to
be a divine teacher, a new Moses. What does he tell us? He shows us
the way to life, the way that he himself has taken. Jesus himself is
the way, and he proposes this way as the path to true happiness.
Throughout his life, from his birth in the stable in Bethlehem until
his death on the cross and his resurrection, Jesus embodied the
Beatitudes. All the promises of God’s Kingdom were fulfilled in
him.
In proclaiming the Beatitudes, Jesus
asks us to follow him and to travel with him along the path of love,
the path that alone leads to eternal life. It is not an easy journey,
yet the Lord promises us his grace and he never abandons us. We face
so many challenges in life: poverty, distress, humiliation, the
struggle for justice, persecutions, the difficulty of daily
conversion, the effort to remain faithful to our call to holiness,
and many others. But if we open the door to Jesus and allow him to be
part of our lives, if we share our joys and sorrows with him, then we
will experience the peace and joy that only God, who is infinite
love, can give.
The Beatitudes of Jesus are new and
revolutionary. They present a model of happiness contrary to what is
usually communicated by the media and by the prevailing wisdom. A
worldly way of thinking finds it scandalous that God became one of us
and died on a cross! According to the logic of this world, those whom
Jesus proclaimed blessed are regarded as useless, 'losers'. What is
glorified is success at any cost, affluence, the arrogance of power
and self-affirmation at the expense of others.
Jesus challenges us, young friends, to
take seriously his approach to life and to decide which path is right
for us and leads to true joy. This is the great challenge of faith.
Jesus was not afraid to ask his disciples if they truly wanted to
follow him or if they preferred to take another path. Simon Peter had
the courage to reply: 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words
of eternal life'. If you too are able to say 'yes' to Jesus, your
lives will become both meaningful and fruitful.
2. The courage to be happy
What does it mean to be 'blessed'
(makarioi in Greek)? To be blessed means to be happy. Tell me: Do
you really want to be happy? In an age when we are constantly being
enticed by vain and empty illusions of happiness, we risk settling
for less and 'thinking small' when it come to the meaning of life.
Think big instead! Open your hearts! As Blessed Piergiorgio Frassati
once said, 'To live without faith, to have no heritage to uphold, to
fail to struggle constantly to defend the truth: this is not living.
It is scraping by. We should never just scrape by, but really live'
(Letter to I. Bonini, 27 February 1925). In his homily on the day of
Piergiorgio Frassati’s beatification (20 May 1990), John Paul II
called him 'a man of the Beatitudes' (AAS 82 [1990], 1518).
If you are really open to the deepest
aspirations of your hearts, you will realize that you possess an
unquenchable thirst for happiness, and this will allow you to expose
and reject the 'low cost' offers and approaches all around you. When
we look only for success, pleasure and possessions, and we turn these
into idols, we may well have moments of exhilaration, an illusory
sense of satisfaction, but ultimately we become enslaved, never
satisfied, always looking for more. It is a tragic thing to see a
young person who 'has everything', but is weary and weak.
Saint John, writing to young people,
told them: 'You are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and
you have overcome the evil one'. oung people who choose Christ are
strong: they are fed by his word and they do not need to ‘stuff
themselves’ with other things! Have the courage to swim against the
tide. Have the courage to be truly happy! Say no to an ephemeral,
superficial and throwaway culture, a culture that assumes that you
are incapable of taking on responsibility and facing the great
challenges of life!
3. Blessed are the poor in spirit...
The first Beatitude, our theme for the
next World Youth Day, says that the poor in spirit are blessed for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven. At a time when so many people are
suffering as a result of the financial crisis, it might seem strange
to link poverty and happiness. How can we consider poverty a
blessing?
First of all, let us try to understand
what it means to be 'poor in spirit'. When the Son of God became man,
he chose the path of poverty and self-emptying. As Saint Paul said in
his letter to the Philippians: 'Let the same mind be in you that was
in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count
equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking
the form of a servant, being born in human likeness'. Jesus is God
who strips himself of his glory. Here we see God’s choice to be
poor: he was rich and yet he became poor in order to enrich us
through his poverty. His is the mystery we contemplate in the crib
when we see the Son of God lying in a manger, and later on the cross,
where his self-emptying reaches its culmination.
The Greek adjective ptochos (poor) does
not have a purely material meaning. It means 'a beggar', and it
should be seen as linked to the Jewish notion of the anawim, 'God’s
poor'. It suggests lowliness, a sense of one’s limitations and
existential poverty. The anawim trust in the Lord, and they know that
they can count on him.
As Saint Therese of the Child Jesus
clearly saw, by his incarnation Jesus came among us as a poor beggar,
asking for our love. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us
that 'man is a beggar before God' and that prayer is the encounter of
God’s thirst and our own thirst.
Saint Francis of Assisi understood
perfectly the secret of the Beatitude of the poor in spirit. Indeed,
when Jesus spoke to him through the leper and from the crucifix,
Francis recognized both God’s grandeur and his own lowliness. In
his prayer, the Poor Man of Assisi would spend hours asking the Lord:
'Who are you?' 'Who am I?' He renounced an affluent and carefree life
in order to marry 'Lady Poverty', to imitate Jesus and to follow the
Gospel to the letter. Francis lived in imitation of Christ in his
poverty and in love for the poor – for him the two were
inextricably linked – like two sides of one coin.
You might ask me, then: What can we do,
specifically, to make poverty in spirit a way of life, a real part of
our own lives? I will reply by saying three things.
First of all, try to be free with
regard to material things. The Lord calls us to a Gospel lifestyle
marked by sobriety, by a refusal to yield to the culture of
consumerism. This means being concerned with the essentials and
learning to do without all those unneeded extras which hem us in. Let
us learn to be detached from possessiveness and from the idolatry of
money and lavish spending. Let us put Jesus first. He can free us
from the kinds of idol-worship which enslave us. Put your trust in
God, dear young friends! He knows and loves us, and he never forgets
us. Just as he provides for the lilies of the field, so he will make
sure that we lack nothing. If we are to come through the financial
crisis, we must be also ready to change our lifestyle and avoid so
much wastefulness. Just as we need the courage to be happy, we also
need the courage to live simply.
Second, if we are to live by this
Beatitude, all of us need to experience a conversion in the way we
see the poor. We have to care for them and be sensitive to their
spiritual and material needs. To you young people I especially
entrust the task of restoring solidarity to the heart of human
culture. Faced with old and new forms of poverty – unemployment,
migration and addictions of various kinds – we have the duty to be
alert and thoughtful, avoiding the temptation to remain indifferent.
We have to remember all those who feel unloved, who have no hope for
the future and who have given up on life out of discouragement,
disappointment or fear. We have to learn to be on the side of the
poor, and not just indulge in rhetoric about the poor! Let us go out
to meet them, look into their eyes and listen to them. The poor
provide us with a concrete opportunity to encounter Christ himself,
and to touch his suffering flesh.
However – and this is my third point
– the poor are not just people to whom we can give something. They
have much to offer us and to teach us. How much we have to learn from
the wisdom of the poor! Think about it: several hundred years ago a
saint, Benedict Joseph Labre, who lived on the streets of Rome from
the alms he received, became a spiritual guide to all sorts of
people, including nobles and prelates. In a very real way, the poor
are our teachers. They show us that people’s value is not measured
by their possessions or how much money they have in the bank. A poor
person, a person lacking material possessions, always maintains his
or her dignity. The poor can teach us much about humility and trust
in God. In the parable of the pharisee and the tax-collector, Jesus
holds the tax-collector up as a model because of his humility and his
acknowledgement that he is a sinner. The widow who gave her last two
coins to the temple treasury is an example of the generosity of all
those who have next to nothing and yet give away everything they
have.
4. … for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven
The central theme of the Gospel is the
kingdom of God. Jesus is the kingdom of God in person; he is
Immanuel, God-with-us. And it is in the human heart that the kingdom,
God’s sovereignty, takes root and grows. The kingdom is at once
both gift and promise. It has already been given to us in Jesus, but
it has yet to be realised in its fullness. That is why we pray to the
Father each day: 'Thy kingdom come'.
There is a close connection between
poverty and evangelisation, between the theme of the last World Youth
Day – 'Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations!' – and
the theme for this year: 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven'. The Lord wants a poor Church which
evangelises the poor. When Jesus sent the Twelve out on mission, he
said to them: 'Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper in your belts, no
bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff; for
the labourers deserve their food'. Evangelical poverty is a basic
condition for spreading the kingdom of God. The most beautiful and
spontaneous expressions of joy which I have seen during my life were
by poor people who had little to hold onto. Evangelisation in our
time will only take place as the result of contagious joy.
We have seen, then, that the Beatitude
of the poor in spirit shapes our relationship with God, with material
goods and with the poor. With the example and words of Jesus before
us, we realize how much we need to be converted, so that the logic of
being more will prevail over that of having more! The saints can best
help us to understand the profound meaning of the Beatitudes. So the
canonization of John Paul II, to be celebrated on the Second Sunday
of Easter, will be an event marked by immense joy. He will be the
great patron of the World Youth Days which he inaugurated and always
supported. In the communion of saints he will continue to be a father
and friend to all of you.
This month of April marks the thirtieth
anniversary of the entrustment of the Jubilee Cross of the Redemption
to the young. That symbolic act by John Paul II was the beginning of
the great youth pilgrimage which has since crossed the five
continents. The Pope’s words on that Easter Sunday in 1984 remain
memorable: 'My dear young people, at the conclusion of the Holy Year,
I entrust to you the sign of this Jubilee Year: the cross of Christ!
Carry it throughout the world as a symbol of the love of the Lord
Jesus for humanity, and proclaim to everyone that it is only in
Christ, who died and rose from the dead, that salvation and
redemption are to be found'.
Dear friends, the Magnificat, the
Canticle of Mary, poor in spirit, is also the song of everyone who
lives by the Beatitudes. The joy of the Gospel arises from a heart
which, in its poverty, rejoices and marvels at the works of God, like
the heart of Our Lady, whom all generations call 'blessed'. May Mary,
Mother of the poor and Star of the new evangelisation help us to live
the Gospel, to embody the Beatitudes in our lives, and to have the
courage always to be happy.”