P R A Y I N G W I T H T H E C H U R C H
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INTENTION : |
That world youth day may inspire or re-awaken in young people the desire to meet Christ and find in him the guide of their own lives.
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The young people who come in great numbers to every World Youth Day (WYD) have very different origins and profess very different creeds, but have in common the will to seek happiness and the sense of their own existence. They are very much in search of reference points and they manifest the need to be enlightened, educated and trained on an intellectual, moral and doctrinal level.
The WYD contributes to creating a "new culture" or more precisely, a "counter culture", as an antidote to the one generated by the secularized society which has excluded God from the social field and relegated faith to the private sphere. WYD makes it possible for young people to live a personal and a community dimension of faith, helping them find the profound unity of their being by combining faith and reason, the "sensory" and the "rational", the "affective" and the "spiritual".
For young persons of our time, the act of believing does not coincide with social conformity but with their will to be different. In this context, the WYD helps them become aware of their identity and of the exigencies implicit in a baptized person's vocation, making them discover that they are all called to sanctity through living the Gospel in the depth of their daily lives. The WYD also exhorts them to return to their origins, to persevere in their faith and to bear witness to it.
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