APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS TO PANAMA ON THE OCCASION OF THE 34th WORLD YOUTH DAY, MEETING WITH CENTRAL AMERICAN BISHOPS (SEDAC), ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS

After the Angelus
[…] There are many young people who have unfortunately been seduced by
immediate answers that mortgage life. And many others who have been given an
illusion of short breath in some movements, and who then make them either pelagian
or convinced they are enough for themselves, and then abandon them halfway. The
Synod Fathers told us: through constraint or lack of alternatives, young people find
themselves immersed in highly conflictual situations and without a rapid solution:
domestic violence, feminicide – what a plague our continent is experiencing in this! –
armed and criminal gangs, drug trafficking, sexual exploitation of minors and no
longer minors, and so on; and it hurts to see that, at the base of many of these
situations, there are experiences of orphanness, the fruit of a culture and a society
that has “gone mad” [if fue “desmadrando”] – without a mother, has made them
orphans. Families very often worn down by an economic system that does not put
people and the common good first and that has made speculation its “paradise” where
continuing to gain weight does not matter at whose expense. And so our young
people without the warmth of a home, without family, without community, without
belonging, are left at the mercy of the first swindler. […]
[…] Many of the migrants have young faces, they are looking for something better
for their families, they are not afraid to risk and leave everything to offer the
minimum conditions that guarantee a better future. Not only the complaint is
sufficient on this, but we must also concretely announce a “good news”. The Church,
thanks to its universality, can offer that fraternal and welcoming hospitality so that
the communities of origin and those of arrival dialogue and contribute to overcoming
fears and mistrusts and reinforcing the bonds that migration, in the collective
imagination, threaten to break. “Welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating”
the people can be the four verbs with which the Church, in this migratory situation,
combines her motherhood in today’s history (see Synod on Youth, Final Document,
147). The Vicar General of Paris, Msgr. Benoist de Sinety, has just published a book
with the subtitle: “Welcoming migrants, an appeal to courage” (see Il faut que des
voix s’élèvent. Accueil des migrants, an appel au courage, Paris 2018). This book is
a joy. He is here at the Day.
All the efforts you can make by building bridges between ecclesial, parish, and
diocesan communities, as well as through the Bishops’ Conferences, will be a
prophetic gesture of the Church which in Christ is “a sign and instrument of the
intimate union with God and the unity of the whole gender human “(Dogmatic
Constitution Lumen Gentium, 1). And so the temptation to limit oneself to a mere
denunciation vanishes and the announcement of the new Life that the Lord gives us
takes place. […]