Dear Catholic Youth,
We send you Our affectionate greetings. We desire, first of all, to praise and encourage your Organization. Your presence at its Biennial Congress shows that you appreciate its importance, that you love it and are faithful to it. For this reason, you deserve Our commendation and Our exhortation; because, in modern times, Organization is necessary in order to complete and fulfil your training. Your Organization trains you to be aware of, and to be faithful to, your own ideas and your faith; it provides you with a group of good friends; it enables you to be apostles in your own state in life, and throughout all society.
Secondly, Our greetings are meant to assure you of Our trust and confidence in you. We have confidence in youth, especially as you belong to an openly Catholic Organization such as yours. It is often said that the youth of today is not as good as youth in past years, and even that youth represents a danger to good social traditions and moral customs. But We are quite sure that such criticism and such fear are not directed at you, because you are Catholic youth. In other words, you are a source of spiritual and moral energy; you possess Christian and human values which can make of you strong, generous, free men, from whom society has nothing to fear, but everything to hope for. With your decisive wills and your civil and Christian rectitude, you are the agents of good, the renovators of modern family and social life.
Finally, Our greetings to you intend to invoke upon you the aid and assistance of Our Lord. We urge you to pray, to pray always, to pray well! This is necessary if your lives are to be truly sensitive to the values of the spirit, aimed and directed towards man’s true goal, which is God.
We pray to Him for you, for your parents, families and friends, and for your Chaplains; and to all We lovingly send Our Apostolic Blessing.
