Statements by Pope John Paul II to young people 

Young people, Pope John Paul II says, are living in a difficult age, full of enthusiasm, but also exposed to dangerous confusion. Speaking at the World Youth Day celebrations in Denver in 1993, Pope John Paul II referred to the almost universal conditions of difficulty in which young people grow up and live. Too many sufferings, he said, are visited upon them by natural calamities, famines, epidemics, by economic and political crises, by the atrocities of wars. And where material conditions are at least adequate, other obstacles arise, not the least of which is the breakdown of family values and stability. In developed countries, a serious moral crisis is already affecting the lives of many young people, leaving them adrift, often without hope, and conditioned to look only for instant gratification. (Welcome Ceremony in Denver, #3) 

Speaking to the young people of Rome in 2001, Pope John Paul II identified some of the key moral issues facing young people today. We live, he said, at a time when society is strongly influenced by models of life that give priority to possessions, pleasure and appearances in a selfish sense. (#2) 

Your limited experience threatens you with the risk of falling prey to those who play on your emotions, who, instead of fostering a critical conscience in you, tend to exalt uninhibitedness and to present immoral choices as values. They blur every distinction between good and evil and present truth with the changing features of expediency. (Address to the young people of Rome, #3) 

Only by instilling a high moral vision, he said, can a society ensure that its young people are given the possibility to mature as free and intelligent human beings, endowed with a robust sense of responsibility to the common good, capable of working with others to create a community and a nation with a strong moral fibre. To educate without a value system based on truth is to abandon young people to moral confusion, personal insecurity and easy manipulation. No country, not even the most powerful, can endure if it deprives its own children of this essential good. Respect for the dignity and worth of every person, integrity and responsibility, as well as understanding, compassion and solidarity towards others, survive only if they are passed on in families, in schools and through the communications media. 

Speaking at the Concluding Mass of the 17th World Youth Day in Canada in 2002, the Pope said: 

There is perhaps no darkness deeper than the darkness that enters young people's souls when false prophets extinguish in them the light of faith and hope and love. The greatest deception, and the deepest source of unhappiness, is the illusion of finding life by excluding God, of finding freedom by excluding moral truths and personal responsibility. The Lord is calling you to choose between these two voices. (Concluding Mass, #2f) 

In 2004, Pope John Paul II wrote his Message to the Youth of the World calling the 20th World Youth Day in Cologne, 2005. In it he states: 

Be worshippers of the only true God, giving Him pride of place in your lives! Idolatry is an ever-present temptation. Sadly, there are those who seek the solution to their problems in religious practices that are incompatible with the Christian faith. There is a strong urge to believe in the facile myths of success and power; it is dangerous to accept the fleeting ideas of the sacred which present God in the form of cosmic energy, or in any other manner that is inconsistent with Catholic teaching. 

My dear young people, do not yield to false illusions and passing fads which so frequently leave behind a tragic spiritual vacuum! Reject the seduction of wealth, consumerism and the subtle violence sometimes used by the mass media. 

Worshipping the true God is an authentic act of resistance to all forms of idolatry. Worship Christ: He is the Rock on which to build your future and a world of greater justice and solidarity. Jesus is the Prince of peace: the source of forgiveness and reconciliation, who can make brothers and sisters of all the members of the human family. (Message for WYD, Cologne 2005, #5) 

In all his addresses to young people, Pope John Paul II called on young people to take Jesus as their model and to have faith in the light of his truth.