Discourse to 10,000 youth of Catholic Action in 1943

My dear young men, I would like to take advantage of these brief moments to point out the innermost foundation of the responsibility that is ours as Catholics. Young men you must concern yourselves with your brothers, with our nation, the group of brothers united by bonds of blood, language and land, because to be Catholic is to be social. Not out of fear for what might be lost, or the threat of persecution, not because we are against anything but rather because you are Catholic you must be social, which is to say, to feel within yourselves the pain of humanity and search for ways to find solutions.

A Christian without an intense concern to love, is like a farmer unconcerned about the earth, a sailor uninterested in the sea , a musician who is careless about harmony. Yes, Christianity is the religion of love, as one poet put it, and as Christ had already told us: The first commandment of the Law is to love the Lord thy God with your whole heart, with your whole mind, with all your strength; and then added immediately and the second is like to this, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself for the love of God. (cf. Mt 22, 37-39). Moments before leaving us the last lesson he explained to us was the repetition of the first, without words: A new commandment I give you that you love one another as I have loved you (Jn 13,34). St. John gives us a resume of the two commandments in one: The commandment of God is that we believe in the name of His son Jesus Christ and that we have love one for another (1 Jn 3,23). St Paul does not hesitate to make the same summary: Owe no one anything except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery , You shall not kill, you shall not steal, You shall not covet” and any other commandment are summed up in this sentence, “’You shall love your neighbor as yourself’“ (Rm 13, 8-9).

In this love for our brothers that the Master commands of us, he himself went before us. We were created out of love and when we had fallen into sin, the Son of God became man to make us sons of God (what some even now consider supreme foolishness). In the Incarnation the Word united himself mystically with all human nature.

It is necessary then to accept the Incarnation with all its consequences, by extending the gift of our love not only to Jesus Christ but also to his Mystical Body. And this is a basic point in Christianity: to forsake the least of our brothers is to forsake Christ himself; to alleviate any one of them is to alleviate Christ, in person. When you wound one of my members you wound me; in the same way, to touch a man is to touch Christ himself. For this reason Christ told us that all the good and all the evil we might do to the least of men, we do to him.

Christ has made himself our neighbor or rather, our neighbor is Christ who presents himself under one or another form: a patient among the sick, a needy man among beggars, a prisoner among the incarcerated, the heartbroken among those who weep. If we do not see him it is because our faith is lukewarm. To separate our neighbor from Christ is to separate light from light. He who loves Christ is obliged to love his neighbor with all his heart, with all is mind, with all his strength. In Christ we are all one. In him there should be neither rich nor poor, neither Jews nor Gentiles, a categoric affirmation immensely superior to: Workers of the world unite! Or the cry of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality Fraternity. Our cry is: Neither proletariat nor bourgeois, all men of the earth, English men and Germans; Italians, Americans, Jews, Japanese, Chileans and Peruvians, let us recognize that we are one in Christ and that we owe ourselves not hatred but the love the body has for itself. May hatred, prejudice and struggle cease in the Christian family and may there be instead an immense love founded in the virtue of justice, justice first, last and always; then the roughness and harshness of “rights” having been overcome, let there be an enormous eruption of charity.

But has this sort of understanding been erased from the Christian soul? Why do they tell us to our faces that we do not practice our Master’s doctrine, that we have magnificent encyclicals but never succeed in making them tangible? Without doing more than skimming this topic I would presume to answer the following: because the Christianity of many of us is superficial. We are living in the era of records, not of wisdom, nor of goodness but of levity and superficiality. This superficiality attacks serious and profound Christian formation without which there is no self- sacrifice. How is anyone going to sacrifice himself if he does not see the reason for his sacrifice? Then if we desire a Christianity of charity, the only authentic Christianity, more serious formation is imperative.

The Christians of today are not any less good than those of other centuries, and in some aspects they are superior all the more because worldly persecutions separate the wheat from the darnel even before the Judgment. But the endemic evil not only of Christians but less expected of them, is that of superficiality, a horrible superficiality. Without any supernatural formation, why would I deprive myself of what is good or of its complete enjoyment when life is so short? On the other hand, when there is faith, the Christian gesture should be wide and encompassing and it begins with a consideration of justice, all justice, and even this is superceded by an enormous charity.

And now, young Catholic men, I cannot keep silence about this: at this moment there is a lack of formation because of a lack of priests. The most profound crisis, the most tragic in its consequences is the insufficiency of priests to break the bread of truth for the little ones, to console the sorrowful, to give a sense of hope, of strength, of joy to this life. You 10,000 young men here today, whom I have seen prepare this meeting with enormous effort, you young people, Catholic families who listen to me, feel in your hearts responsibility for souls, the responsibility for the future of our nation. If there are no priests, there are no sacraments, if there are no sacraments there is no grace, if there is no grace, there is no heaven and even in this life, hatred will consist in the bitterness of a love unable to orient itself, because it lacked the minister of love who is the priest. Conscious of their faith which is generosity, conscious of their love for Christ and their brothers, may our youth not hesitate to say Yes to the Lord.

And since each moment has its ideological characteristic, it is extremely consoling to remember what is specific to our times: the awakening of our social conscience, the application of our faith to the problems of the moment, problems more tormenting than ever before. God and Country; Cross and Flag, have never been so present as they are now in the spirit of our youth. The charity of Christ urges us to work with all our soul so that Chile grow, daily, more profoundly Christ’s, for Christ wishes it and Chile needs it. As for us, Christians, other Christs, let us give our self-sacrificing labor. May Catholic youth from Arica to Magallanes, stimulated by the responsibility for the light received, be living witnesses for Christ. And Chile, seeing the ardor of this charity, will recognize the Catholic faith, that Mother who brought them forth and made them grow in great pain and they will say to the Master: O Christ, you are the Son of the living God, you are the resurrection and the Life!