To the Young People of France (1 June 1980)

On Sunday, 1 June 1980, the Holy Father met in Paris with the youth of France. In his address, the Pope spoke on the values of mind, body, and heart.

Thank you, thank you, dear young people of France, for coming this evening for this vigil with the Pope! Thank you for your confidence! Thanks to everyone who wrote to me! Meeting young people is always a highlight of my pastoral visits. Thank you for what you have prepared tonight for the eyes and for the heart! You give me your testimony now, you profess your faith. And I, then, I will speak of your life as young people, bearing in mind your questions, and I will profess with you all the faith of the Church.

Dear young people of France,

1. Thank you very much for coming in such numbers, so joyful, so confident, so united among yourselves! Thank you to the young people of Paris and the Paris region! Thank you to the young people who came with enthusiasm from all over France! I would have liked so much to shake hands with each of you, to meet their gaze, to say a personal and friendly word to them. This material impossibility is not an obstacle to the profound communion of minds and hearts. Your exchanges of testimonies are proof of this. Your assembly rejoices my eyes and upsets my heart. Your assembly of young people wanted to be worthy of the crowds of young people I have already met during my apostolic journeys, first in Mexico, then in Poland, Ireland, the United States, and very recently in Africa.

I can confide it to you: God has given me the grace - like so many bishops and priests - to love young people passionately, certainly different from one country to another, but so similar in their enthusiasm and their disappointments, their aspirations and their generosity! Those of you who have had the opportunity to establish contacts and friendships with the youth of another province, of another country, of another continent than your own, perhaps understand better and certainly share my faith in young people, because they are everywhere, today as yesterday, bearers of great hopes for the world and for the Church. Young people of France, convinced Christians or sympathizers towards Christianity, I would like, on this unforgettable evening, that we all make an ascent together, a real rope in the direction of the summits, both difficult and invigorating, of the vocation of man, of Christian man. I indeed want to share with you, like a friend with his friends, my own convictions as a man and as a servant of the faith and of the unity of the people of God.

2. Your problems and your sufferings as young people are known to me, at least on a general level: a certain instability inherent in your age and increased by the acceleration of changes in history, a certain distrust of certainties, exacerbated by knowledge learned at school and the frequent atmosphere of systematic criticism, worry about the future and the difficulties of professional integration, the excitement and overabundance of desires in a society that makes pleasure the goal of life, the painful feeling of powerlessness to master the equivocal or harmful consequences of progress, the temptations of revolt, escape or resignation. All this, you know, to the point of being saturated with it. I prefer, with you, to reach the heights.

3. The human being is a corporeal being . This very simple statement has serious consequences. However material it may be, the body is not an object among other objects. He is first of all someone, in the sense that he is a manifestation of the person, a means of presence to others, of communication, of extremely varied expression. The body is a word, a language. What a marvel and what a risk at the same time!

Young men and women, have great respect for your bodies and the bodies of others! May your body be at the service of your inner self! May your gestures, your looks, always reflect your soul! Body worship? No never! Disregard for the body? No more. Body mastery! Yes! Body transformation! Moreover!

You often admire this marvelous transparency of the soul in many men and women in the daily performance of their human tasks. Think of the student or the sportsman who put all their physical energies at the service of their respective ideal. Think of the mom and dad whose faces bent over their child breathe so deeply the joys of fatherhood and motherhood. Think of the musician or actor identified with the authors they bring to life. See the Trappist or the Carthusian, the Carmelite or the Poor Clare radically given over to contemplation and letting God shine through.

I sincerely hope that you will rise to the challenge of this time and that you will all be champions of Christian mastery of the body. The sport well understood, and which is reborn today beyond the circle of professionals, is a very good adjuvant.

This mastery is decisive for the integration of sexuality into your life as young people and adults. It is difficult to talk about sexuality in the current era, marked by a release which is not without explanation but which is. alas, favored by a real exploitation of the sexual instinct.

Young people in France, the union of bodies has always been the strongest language that two beings can say to each other. And this is why such a language, which touches on the sacred mystery of man and woman, demands that we never perform the gestures of love without the conditions of a total and definitive assumption of responsibility on the other hand are assured, and that the engagement is made publicly in the marriage. Young people of France, keep or find a healthy vision of bodily values! Contemplate more on Christ the Redeemer of man! He is the Word made flesh that so many artists have painted with realism to clearly signify to us that he has assumed all of human nature, including sexuality, by sublimating it in chastity.

4. The spirit is the original datum which fundamentally distinguishes man from the animal world and which gives him a power of mastery over the universe. I cannot resist quoting your incomparable French writer Pascal: “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature; but it is a thinking reed. The entire universe must not arm itself to crush it...; but when the universe would crush him, man would be even more noble than what kills him, because he knows that he is dying; and the advantage the universe has over him, the universe does not know. All our dignity therefore consists in thought...; therefore let us work to think well”[ 1 ].

By speaking thus of the spirit, I mean the spirit capable of understanding, of wanting, of loving. It is properly by this that man is man. Safeguard at all costs in you and around you the sacred domain of the spirit! You know that in the contemporary world, there are still, alas, totalitarian systems which paralyze the spirit, seriously undermine the integrity, the identity of man, by reducing him to the state of object , of a machine, by depriving it of its strength of inner rebound, of its outbursts of freedom and love. You also know that there are economic systems which, while boasting of their formidable industrial expansion, at the same time accentuate the degradation, the decomposition of man.

Even the mass media, which should contribute to the integral development of men and to their reciprocal enrichment in a growing fraternity, are not without provoking a hammering and even the bewitchment of intelligences and imaginations which harm the health of the human being. The mind, judgment and heart distort man's ability to discern what is healthy from what is unhealthy. Yes, what good are social and political reforms, even very generous ones, if the spirit, which is also conscience, loses its lucidity and its vigor?

Practically, in this world as it is and from which you must not flee, learn more and more to reflect, to think! The studies you do must be a privileged moment of learning about the life of the mind. Unmask slogans, false values, mirages, dead ends! I wish you a spirit of recollection, of interiority. Each and every one of you, at your level, must promote the primacy of the spirit and even contribute to restoring honor to what has value for eternity even more than for the future. By living like this, believers or non-believers, you are very close to God. God is Spirit!

5. You are also worth what your heart is worth . The whole history of humanity is the history of the need to love and to be loved. This end of the century - especially in regions of accelerated social evolution - makes it more difficult for a healthy affectivity to flourish. This is no doubt why many young and old seek the atmosphere of small groups, in order to escape anonymity and sometimes anxiety, in order to rediscover their deep vocation to interpersonal relationships. According to a certain publicity, our era is even in love with what one could call heart doping.

It is important in this area, as in the previous ones, to see clearly. Whatever use humans make of it, the heart - a symbol of friendship and love - also has its standards, its ethics. Making room for the heart in the harmonious construction of your personality has nothing to do with sentimentality or even sentimentality. The heart is the openness of the whole being to the existence of others, the capacity to guess them, to understand them. Such sensitivity, varied and deep, makes you vulnerable. This is why some are tempted to get rid of it by hardening themselves.

To love is therefore essentially to give oneself to others. Far from being an instinctive inclination, love is a conscious decision of the will to reach out to others. To be able to truly love , you have to detach yourself from many things and above all from yourself, give freely, love to the end. This dispossession of oneself - a long-term undertaking - is exhausting and exhilarating. It is a source of balance. She is the secret of happiness.

Young people of France, raise your eyes more often to Jesus Christ! He is the Man who loved the most, and the most consciously, the most voluntarily, the most gratuitously! Meditate on Christ's testament: “There is no greater proof of love than to lay down one's life for those one loves”. Contemplate the Man-God, the man with the pierced heart! Do not be afraid! Jesus did not come to condemn love but to liberate love from its ambiguities and its counterfeits. It is he who turned the heart of Zacchaeus, of the Samaritan woman, and who still works today, throughout the world, similar conversions. It seems to me that tonight Christ is whispering to each and every one of you: “Give me your heart! ... I will purify it, I will strengthen it, I will direct it to all who need it: to your own family, towards your school or university community, towards your social environment, towards the unloved, towards foreigners who live on French soil, towards inhabitants of the whole world who do not have enough to live and develop, towards the smallest children 'between men. Love requires sharing!”.

Young people of France, it is time more than ever to work hand in hand for the civilization of love, according to the expression dear to my great predecessor Paul VI. What a gigantic construction site! What an exciting task!

On the plane of the heart, of love, I still have a confidence to make to you. I believe with all my strength that many of you are capable of risking the total gift, to Christ and to your brothers, of all your powers of love. You understand perfectly that I mean the vocation to the priesthood and to religious life. Your towns and villages in France are waiting for ministers with burning hearts to announce the Gospel, celebrate the Eucharist, reconcile sinners with God and with their brothers. They also expect women radically consecrated to the service of Christian communities and their human and spiritual needs. Your eventual response to this call is well in line with Jesus' final question to Peter: “Do you love me?”.

6. I spoke about the values ​​of body, mind and heart. But at the same time I gave a glimpse of an essential dimension without which man falls back as a prisoner of himself or of others: it is openness to God . Yes, without God, man loses the key himself, he loses the key to his story. For, since creation, he bears within him the likeness of God. This remains in him in the state of implicit wish and unconscious need, despite the sin. And man is destined to live with God. Here again, Christ will reveal himself to us as our way. But this mystery perhaps demands greater attention from us.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, lived all that makes the value of our human nature, body, mind and heart, in a completely free relationship with others, marked with the seal of truth and filled with love. All his life, as much as his words, manifested this freedom, this truth, this love, and especially the voluntary gift of his life for men. He was thus able to proclaim the charter of a blessed world, yes blessed, on the path of poverty, of gentleness, of justice, of hope, of mercy, of purity, of peace, of fidelity even in persecution, and two thousand years later, this charter is inscribed at the heart of our gathering. But Christ did not only set the example and teach. He has effectively freed men and women from that which held their bodies captive, their minds and hearts. And since he died and rose again for us, he continues to do so, for men and women of all conditions and of all countries, as long as they give him their faith. He is the Savior of man. He is the Redeemer of man. “Ecce homo”, said Pilate, without really understanding the meaning of his words: “Here is the man”.

How dare we say that, dear friends? The earthly life of Christ was brief, his public activity even shorter. But his life is unique, his personality is unique in the world. He is not just a brother to us, a friend, a man of God. We recognize in him the only Son of God, the one who is one with God the Father and whom the Father has given to the world. With the Apostle Peter, of whom I am the humble Successor, I profess: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”. And it is indeed because Christ shares both the divine nature and our human nature that the offering of his life, in his death and resurrection, reaches us, we the men of today, saves us , purifies us, liberates us, elevates us: “The Son of God has united himself in a certain way with every man”. [2 ]

If Christ liberates and elevates our humanity, it is because he introduces it into the covenant with God, with the Father, with the Son, with the Holy Spirit. We were celebrating the Holy Trinity this morning. This is the true openness to God to which every human heart aspires even without knowing it and which Christ offers to the believer. It is a personal God and not only the God of philosophers and scholars, but the God revealed in the Bible, God of Abraham, God of Jesus Christ, the one who is at the heart of our history. It is the God who can seize all the resources of your body, of your mind, of your heart, to bring them to fruition, in a word, who can seize your whole being to renew it in Christ, now and in the future. beyond death.

This is my faith, this is the faith of the Church since its origins, the only one founded on the testimony of the Apostles, the only one that resists wavering, the only one that saves man. I'm sure many of you have experienced this before. May they find in my coming an encouragement to deepen it by all the means that the Church places at their disposal.

Others, no doubt, are more hesitant to adhere fully to this faith. Some claim to be researching this. Some consider themselves unbelievers and perhaps unable to believe, or indifferent to faith. Others still refuse a God whose face has been misrepresented to them. Finally, others, shaken by the repercussions of philosophies of suspicion that present religion as illusion or alienation, are perhaps tempted to build a humanism without God. To all of them, however, I wish that, out of honesty, they at least leave their window open to God. Otherwise they risk missing the path of the man who is Christ, locking themselves into attitudes of revolt, violence, contenting themselves with sighs of helplessness or resignation. A world without God is built sooner or later against man. Certainly,

But in fact, if you want it, in the midst of these difficulties which I understand, you still finally have a lot of luck, in your country of religious freedom, to clear this path and reach, with the grace of God, faith! You can afford it! Do you really take them? In the name of all the love I have for you, I do not hesitate to invite you: “Open wide your doors to Christ!”. What are you afraid of? Trust him. Risk following him. This obviously requires that you come out of yourselves, of your reasonings, of your “wisdom”, of your indifference, of your sufficiency, of the non-Christian habits that you have perhaps adopted. Yes, this requires renunciations, a conversion, which you must first dare to desire, to ask for, in prayer and to begin to practice. Let Christ be the Way for you, Truth and Life. Let it be your salvation and your happiness. Let him take hold of your whole life so that it reaches all its dimensions with him, so that all your relationships, activities, feelings, thoughts are integrated in him, one could say “christified”. I hope that with Christ you will recognize God as the source and the end of your existence.

These are the men and women that the world needs, that France needs. You will personally have the happiness promised in the Beatitudes and you will be, in all humility and respect for others, and in their midst, the leaven of which the Gospel speaks. You will build a new world; you will prepare a Christian future. It's a way of the cross, yes, it's also a way of joy, because it's a way of hope.

With all my trust and all my affection, I invite the young people of France to raise their heads and walk together on this path, hand in hand with the Lord. “Lady, get up! Young man, get up!”.

 [ 1 ] Pascal, Thoughts , n. 347.

 [ 2 ] Ioannis Pauli PP. II Redemptor Hominis , 13.

© Copyright 1980 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

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