The youth are filled with potential with extraordinary gifts.

How beautiful and rich with possibilities and gifts in the life of each person. Gifts that manifest inclinations touched in gestures and attitudes that accompany the life of everybody. They are facts that identify the profile citizens that can be channeled for the good, but also for ends that are shady and perverse.

We can understand as gift the vocation to the state of life lived on the path of the realization of persons, in the context of their life. This has been reflected upon in the passing of the month of August called the “Vocational Month”. The highlights are given for sacerdotal life, the mission of being father, of religious life, of catechist and of Christian laity.

In the vision of Pope Francis, revealed during World Youth Day, the youth have potentiality with extraordinary gifts. with this they are enabled for a radical transformation process of society. They are not the future, but a promising present and filled with hope to construct a different and healthy world.

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We felt the enthusiasm and the grab of youth at WYD 2013 in Rio de Janeiro. In the words of Pope Francis, the youth show the face of youth of being Christian and of being committed to the faith. I saw in them the protagonists of a new society and of a Church giving more of a witness of faith in the world demanding new transformation.

Speaking of the gifts of vocation means looking to the human person, principally to the youth, as port of entry to the “post-modern” culture. Time of much diversity and of creativity and of always new possibilities. But it is necessary to go against an individualism that alienates and subtractss the person from the communitarian context and isolates him.

We celebrate the vocation of religious, of those that make an option of a life in a Religious Congregation, putting themselves at the disposal for a specific work in the life of the Church and of society. This was part of the fertility of the Holy Spirit in the dynamism of the life of the Church community, vitalizing areas of action for the good of the people.

Archbishop Paulo Mendes Peixoto
Archbishop of Uberaba, Minas Gerais, Brazil

translated from Portuguese