Mission World
18.11.2008
WYD, a turning point and new impulse to Youth Pastoral Care in Australia
Sydney (FIDES) - Australia's network of Catholic diocesan youth pastoral co-ordinators is working intensely in view of the 23rd World Youth Day in Sydney in July this year.
The event is expected to have a major impact on young Australians and pastoral workers who are already thinking about post-WYD pastoral care, planning an itinerary of meetings and events to involve young people on the wave of WYD enthusiasm.
The co-ordinators intend to increase the number of young community leaders to encourage their peers to become active participants in parish and diocesan pastoral activity and to promote and encourage spiritual growth.
According to Jesuit Fr Des Dwyer, researcher and expert on youth, World Youth Day will foster new interest in young people for the Catholic faith and for Catholic Church initiatives after WYD. Although surveys show that a low percentage of young people aged 15-30 take an active part in Church life, the Jesuit is convinced that WYD could mark a turning point, and reverse this tendency.
"It's up to us to be creative to meet the different needs of youth."
Pope cites two Asians as ‘Witnesses of Hope' in new encyclical
Vatican City (UCAN) - In his new encyclical on hope, Pope Benedict XVI argues that "a world without God is a world without hope" and presents two Vietnamese Catholics as inspiring "Witnesses of Hope" and belief in "life after death" for the 21st century.
In this highly readable text, the theologian-Pope seeks to respond to the reality that in a world conditioned by scientific achievements and relativism, many people live with "greater and lesser hopes" but have no "great hope."
"We need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope which must surpass everything else," he says.
"The great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain," he asserts in Spe Salvi (In hope we were saved), a title taken from St Paul's Letter to the Romans. "To come to know God - the true God - means to receive hope."
In the encyclical, Pope Benedict offers three "settings" for "learning and practicing hope" in today's world: prayer, action and suffering, and the Last Judgment. He cites the witness of the late Vietnamese Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, who died in 2002, to illustrate the first setting.
The Cardinal's book Prayers of Hope, reveals that "in a situation of seemingly utter hopelessness," during 13 years in prison, nine of these in solitary confinement, "the fact that he could listen and speak to God became for him an increasing power of hope."
This experience "enabled him, after his release, to become for people all over the world a witness to hope - to that great hope which does not wane even in nights of solitude," according to the Pope.
In discussing the second setting for learning and practicing hope, "action and suffering," the Pontiff acknowledges "we must do whatever we can to reduce suffering." But "to banish it from the world altogether is not in our power," he adds. "It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love."
In this context he recalls the courageous witness given by Vietnamese St Paul Le Bao Tinh, a priest arrested in 1841 and beheaded in 1857 at the age of 64. A letter the martyr wrote in 1843 to seminarians "illustrates this transformation of suffering through the power of hope springing from faith," the Pope says, citing a passage at length.
"This is a letter from ‘Hell,'" the Pope writes. "It lays bare all the horror of a concentration camp, where to the torments inflicted by the tyrants upon their victims is added the outbreak of evil in the victims themselves."
Nonetheless, he continues, "It reveals the truth that God is present there too: Christ descended into ‘Hell' and is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their darkness into light."
