It is with the truth of Jesus, dear young people, that you must face the great questions in your lives, as well as the practical problems. The world will try to deceive you about many things that matter: about your faith, about pleasure and material things, about the dangers of drugs. And at one stage or another the false voices of the world will try to exploit your human weakness by telling you that life has no meaning at all for you. The supreme theft in your lives would be if they succeeded in robbing you of hope. They will try, but not succeed if you hold fast to Jesus and his truth.
The truth of Jesus is capable of reinforcing all your energies. It will unify your lives and consolidate your sense of mission. You may still be vulnerable to attack from the pressures of the world, from the forces of evil, from the power of the devil. But you will be invincible in hope: “in Christ Jesus our hope” (1Tim. 1, 1).
Dear young people: the word of Jesus and his truth and his promises of fulfilment and life are the Church’s response to the culture of death, to the onslaughts of doubt and to the cancer of despair.
Let me just add two practical thoughts from the Second Vatican Council. The Council tells us that we must avoid thinking that we have at hand the solutions to all the particular problems of life (Cfr. Gaudium et Spes, 33). But at the same time the Church knows that she possesses the light in which the solutions to the problems of humanity can be discovered (Ibid. 12). What is this light? What can it be? Only the truth of Jesus Christ!
Pope John Paul II
Address to the Young People of New Orleans
September 12, 1987
