Please remember to say the third day of the Novena for Vocations which is available at K's blog.
It is children and young people who are often the first to experience the consequences of this eclipse of love and hope. Often, instead of feeling loved and cherished, they appear to be merely tolerated. In "an age of turbulence" they frequently lack adequate moral guidance from the adult world, to the serious detriment of their intellectual and spiritual development. Many children now grow up in a society which is forgetful of God and of the innate dignity of the human person made in God's image. In a world shaped by the accelerating processes of globalization, they are often exposed solely to materialistic visions of the universe, of life and human fulfillment.I pray that our society might value children and see to it that all children may have adequate education, health care, and food along with loving parents.
Yet children and young people are by nature receptive, generous, idealistic and open to transcendence. They need above all else to be exposed to love and to develop in a healthy human ecology, where they can come to realize that they have not been cast into the world by chance, but through a gift that is part of God's loving plan. Parents, educators and community leaders, if they are to be faithful to their own calling, can never renounce their duty to set before children and young people the task of choosing a life project directed towards authentic happiness, one capable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood, good and evil, justice and injustice, the real world and the world of "virtual reality."
"If we don't want to be fools and blind the intellect there's no reason for doubt. Receiving Communion is not like picturing with the imagination, as when we reflect upon the Lord on the cross or in other episodes of the Passion, when we picture within ourselves how things happened to Him in the past. In Communion the event is happening now, and it is entirely true. There's no reason to go looking for Him in some other place far away"Please pray to and for the soul of Megan L. Boever. I did not know her, but my sister-in-law did. She was 30 years old, and like St Gianna died a martyr's death for love of her unborn child. Megan had cancer while pregnant with her 4th child and gave up treatment so the baby could live. She's a powerful example that not everyone in the US is a participant or a passive onlooker in the "culture of death."
Photo Source: REUTERS/Peter Andrews
