Vatican City, 28 June 2013: Pope’s General Prayer Intention for the month of July
2013 - that World Youth Day in Brazil may encourage all young Christians to become
disciples and missionaries of the Gospel.
The beginnings of the World Youth
Days (WYD) go back to 1984, when John Paul II invited the young people of the world
to take part in the International Youth Jubilee. In 1986 the Pope established the
WYD, calling together the first for the year 1987. Since then they have all been important
events for thousands of young people to deepen their faith and discover their vocation
to evangelisation. Once more the Pope invites us to pray for the next World Youth
Day, which is to take place in 2013 in Rio de Janeiro. The intention is clear: that
the WYD may encourage young people to become disciples and missionaries of the gospel.
To pray, then, that the World Youth Day may encourage all young Christians
to become disciples and missionaries of the gospel is to pray that the Holy Spirit
may arouse in them deep loyalty to Christ and his message. Only someone who is passionate
about Jesus and his gospel can be a disciple and a missionary. We know that this passion
and this deep loyalty do not have their deepest source in one’s own will, nor in the
knowledge that we may acquire about the person of Jesus and his gospel, even though
that is all necessary. Deep, true loyalty to the person of Christ and his gospel come,
in the last resort, from the Holy Spirit’s action in our hearts. ‘The soul’s sweet
guest’ as the hymn says, is the one who can shake us out of the tangled nets that
our egoism unfolds before us, urging us to seek personal pleasure above all, or to
secure the future with titles, money, relationships and so many other things that
lead to self-fulfilment, as if that were the ultimate meaning of life.
The
Holy Spirit, the Paraclete (Advocate) is the one who can make us realise that Christ
is the real meaning for our lives. Only God saves! Only God can make us fall in love
with Christ and his gospel. Our job is to ask for and to receive the Spirit who wants
to bring new life to our hearts.
St. Augustine reminds us that prayer prepares
us to receive the gifts that God offers us: “… our God and Lord does not ask us to
reveal our desires to him, because he, certainly, cannot be unaware of them, but he
asks that, through prayer, our capacity to desire may grow, so that in that way we
may make ourselves more able to receive the gifts that he is preparing for us.’ (Letters
to Proba, letters 130, 8, 15,CSEL 44, 56-67)
The Pope asks our prayers that
the World Youth Day may be a special opportunity, a favourable space, fertile soil,
to receive the Holy Spirit, who is offering himself to all young Christians. Let us
pray that young people’s desire to know and love Jesus may grow more intense, so that
the strength from on high may animate them to be disciples of Christ and missionaries
of his gospel. Source: VR Sedoc