National Youth Day reflection

“Like newborn infants, you must long for the pure, spiritual milk, that in him you may grow to salvation, alleluia.” – says the introit of the Sunday after Easter. It seems providential that the close of the #NYDcebu2019 activities is the Sunday after Easter, the Sunday this introit was sung. I believe these words from scripture express well the status quo among us, the youth today. Young Catholics are hungry for solid Christian formation; hungry for a solid spiritual life. Although we do not have the vocabulary to express it, the youth are trying to express their need for a solid catholic spirituality.

Throughout the NYD activities, I was privileged to facilitate the sharings of young people. They say that they came to #NYDcebu2019 to deepen their faith, to strengthen their relationship with God. They speak of the Church, the one true faith. They speak of not knowing how to deal with spiritual aridity, etc. To me this expresses the hunger of the youth for solid Christian spirituality, for solid means to become saints, for solid means to get them canonized. This is the hunger spoken of in the introit. The young are not satisfied with politically correct or morally-therapeutic-deist spiritualities. They want… I mean we, the youth, want solid Christian spirituality, solid foundations of the spiritual life. We want the spiritualities that made saints like Lorenzo, Pedro, Aloysius, Dominic Savios, Thereses, Giorgio Fassatis, John Paul IIs, etc.

The young people are aware, without the words to express it, that the feel-good prayers, the feel-good inspirational talks are not enough to get them canonized. They know that these things are not solid foundations of the spiritual life.

At first this is something upsetting because it tells us that those who are supposed to teach us about how to live devout lives have not done their duty. While everyone talks about all sorts of sweet lemony things, feeling good about yourself, being nice to everyone, almost nobody now talks to the youth about piety, mortification, mental prayer, spiritual reading, frequent confession, devotion to the Eucharist, true devotion to Mary, guarding the virtue of purity, etc. While the former is no less important, the latter should not be neglected. If the latter is neglected, our catholic youth movements — as in the words of the author of the golden book, the “Soul of the Apostolate,” ven. Jean Baptiste Chautard — become nothing but a club run by the church. For anyone involved in the youth movement it is beneficial to look into the life of St. John Bosco, a great saint of the young people. Reading his Biographical Memoirs, it is clear that as he secured the material welfare of his boys, he concerned himself primarily with their spiritual welfare. It was a great pain to him to know that a boy had fallen into the great misfortune of mortal sin, or has taken a sacrilegious communion, or has lost his purity, etc. While St. John Bosco produced Statesmen, Bishops, and Cardinals, all of those achievements combined would not have brought as much joy to him as the canonization of St. Dominic Savio and the beatification of Blessed Laura Vicuña.

As #NYDcebu2019 was about to close, I was privileged to have been part of the choir that sang for the Eucharistic Adoration. From where we stayed, we found the lights rather glaring hence it was difficult to see Our Lord in the monstrance. This, according to many saints, describes of the spiritual life. As the soul grows closer to God, she finds God rather glaring that the soul seems to become rather blinded and the small defects of the soul becomes more obvious on account of the light that shines. To many souls in the spiritual life, they are filled with confusion and do not know what to do. This shows how, without a reliable guide, without solid foundations of spirituality, the ascent of the soul to God, the road to holiness, becomes more difficult and confusing. It is because of this that the souls of the young need to have solid foundations of the spiritual life.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for holiness, they will be satisfied (Mt. V, 6).

* * * * * *

Lance Patrick Enad y Caballero is a seminarian in Cebu. Instaurare omnia in Christo et Immaculata! lancivspatricivs@gmail.com