I was recently involved in a wedding and in attendance were a number of friends of the happy couple, friends who were already a few years married and who now had little infants in tow. On the sanctuary I started doing calculations in my head: “Those little infants won’t be my age until approaching the year 2080 – and I certainly won’t be around then. I was thinking what kind of world, and what kind of Church, will they inhabit? And what kinds of men and women will they be? What kinds of Christians will they be? But seeing the calibre of their young mums and dads beside them in the pews and I felt reassured by the thought that those tiny kids would be receiving a first class formation from those young parents.
Back in the fourth century BC, Demosthenes wrote that “The greatest blessing of a state is the education of its youth.” The Greeks clearly didn’t think education involved the churning out of robots for a “work-force”. In fact they coined a special term for forming the young boys and girls of Greece: paideia. “Paideia”, in the words of Demosthenes’ compatriot Aristotle, “is the training of the mind and character in the pursuit of excellence.”
Excellence! A State needs to engage in a bit of soul searching when its youngsters have gone feral, when one runs the risk of being murdered on certain streets in its cities, not by grown men but by youths still only in their mid teens. Putting more Gardaí on the streets is nothing more than a very short-term solution. Here the root the problem must be one of a profound breakdown in formation.
Next week I will be accompanying a group of young men to Lisbon for World Youth Day, running from 1-6 August. This event brings back to my mind my first WYD back in 1991 with Pope St John Paul II, and an idea he always repeated at these events – that the future of the world was in the hands of young people. This was one of the key themes of his 1985 Apostolic Letter to young people, Dilecti Amici:
In you there is hope, for you belong to the future, just as the future belongs to you. For hope is always linked to the future; it is the expectation of “future good things”…. In this sense the future belongs to you young people, just as it once belonged to the generation of those who are now adults, and precisely together with them it has become the present reality. Responsibility for this present reality and for its shape and many different forms lies first of all with adults. To you belongs responsibility for what will one day become reality together with yourselves, but which still lies in the future (Dilecti Amici, #1).
The vocation of forming young people must be one of the important vocations there is. Whether this is a young mother looking after her young children at home, a dad challenging his children to live much more than a merely animal life, or teachers doing their best to impart the learning and values of a nation to school children and university students.
And since schools around the country will be starting up in September it is timely to remember what Pope St John Paul II says in Dilecti Amici to educationalists:
The work which characterises the period of youth is, above all, a preparation for the work of adulthood, and so is linked to the school. As I write these words to you young people, I am therefore thinking of all the schools all over the world to which your young lives are linked for a number of years, at higher and higher levels, according to your degree of intellectual development and your inclinations: from elementary schools to universities. I am also thinking of all the adults, my brothers and sisters, who are your teachers and instructors, the guides of your young minds and characters. How great is their task! What a special responsibility is theirs! But how great too is their merit! (Dilecti Amici, #12).
We should be very grateful to parents and teachers for this dedicating their lives to “the greatest blessing of a state” – the formation of its youth.