“The Gospel carries us with a young heart”

Card. Roger Etchegaray

Some months ago Cardinal James Stafford asked me to have with you what he called – using a very young expression – a “conversation” on the theme “Christ needs young people”. I had accepted all the more gladly because I had, naively, taken the invitation to mean he himself needed a young person to introduce your working session on the 15^th World Youth Day. Man proposes, but God decides, even for a Cardinal: the change in plans, for the event of the Pope’s audience, turns this spiritual conversation into a simple greeting. It’s shorter but it is also more determined, younger I would say! But I would still like to approach the proposed theme: “Christ needs young people”. Reflecting, praying on the idea that Christ needs young people, I said to myself that not only the next World Youth Days but the whole of the Jubilee year could take place following this leit motif, dynamic, mobilising, as we say today: Christ, today and yesterday, the Christ of always who travels not only the paths of Judea and Galilee, but the whole world with his slogan or better with his cry from the heart: “convert and believe in the Gospel”. And for today, like 2000 years ago, the eternally young which is God made man needs to be accompanied above all by young apostles, because one needs to have strength and enthusiasm, in brief all the qualities and even those small defects which allow one to recognise a young person. The Gospel is carried with a young heart, even more than with fast legs or cheerful voices. I have given many sermons and conferences during the course of my life and below many skies, how many times I have announced, cried Jesus above the roofs! But I confess that I recognise myself most as a witness of Christ when the announcement takes the form of an answer to those curious of my Christian life: “Why are you a Christian?” Strange question: I don’t like it when that question is put to me, or rather I don’t really like answering it: in a certain way it’s my secret and especially my mystery. “Why are you a Christian?” Difficult question: every time they have asked me (and young people have the art of asking it directly, without going round in circles) every time that, despite everything, I try to answer it I felt rejuvenated, rejuvenated in my baptismal faith, clean of every encrustation, from the routine that covers my old Christian skin. Why are you a Christian? An embarrassing question that has always made me uncomfortable when I have tried answering it on my own: with such a singular question I have managed to answer only in the plural form… that is in the Church, in the link with other Christians of every race, every culture, of every age. And especially when I found myself in the middle of young people, searchers of God, I found myself to be proud of being a Christian in a Church looking towards the future. It’s true, the Gospel is not a cartoon for retarded adolescents, or a book of romance, today less than ever. Today too, and the Pope doesn’t cease to remind us, the Gospel cannot be written by each one of us but with characters in blood. With the blood of the martyrs, more timely, more necessary than ever. And one needs to be young to accept this folly, even if one dies at an advanced age like the apostle John. Yes, the Christ needs young people, but young people that need him, of him true God and true Man, and not a Christ for a hit parade.

But, for this, we give faith to God even more than to young people. He is the owner of the impossible, as he had said to the girl from Nazareth. It’s up to him to deal with modernity, post-modernity, with the new generations that arise, however disconcerting they may be. As far as we are concerned we believe simply in the God of Abraham, in the God that is always capable of arousing a descent of young believers. As far as we are concerned, we dare, we dare with Christ to announce the Good News to the young people of today. Of grace, we do not take the world away from God, his Spirit knows how to speak to the young people of today, let’s let him talk, let us not try to tame a Gospel without frontiers. Let the great meeting of the month of August allow the explosion of the force of the Gospel, as Saint Paul says, in the weakness of the young people that we are, all young people but equally weak: two adjectives that go well with the Gospel of Christ. All the paths of young people lead to Rome, to Denver, Manila, Paris, just to mention the last few places. Happy gathering in Rome, which has opened all its doors of the Holy Year.