In the brief time since his election Pope Leo XIV has shared thousands of spoken words of wisdom. Last weekend he recorded a personal message for the young people of Chicago, the city of his birth, who had joined together for a special celebration to mark the fact that a man from their home city is now Pope. Pope Leo’s video and the full text of his address are here: Full text: Pope Leo XIV’s address to the young people of Chicago and the whole world | USCCB
Addressing young people, Pope Leo said:
“I’d like to take this opportunity to invite each one of you to look into your own hearts, to recognise that God is present and that, perhaps in many different ways, God is reaching out to you, calling you, inviting you to know his Son Jesus Christ…”
Pope Leo’s language of invitation is striking. Each of us is given freedom of will and choice, but we have an invitation to reflect on the role that God has in our lives. God loves us, and if we open our hearts to him we will find that he is indeed reaching out to us, calling us, and inviting us into deeper relationship with him.
Pope Leo continued to say:
“… to discover how important it is for each one of us to pay attention to the presence of God in our own hearts, to that longing for love in our lives, for … searching, a true searching, for finding the ways that we may be able to do something with our own lives to serve others.”
We are encouraged not to think too much about ourselves and our own satisfaction, but instead about using our lives to serve others. ‘Serve in a way that is always new’ is of course a teaching from the charism of St Jeanne, and is a statement of our school ethos with which all our students are familiar.
Lastly in this short reflection on the Pope’s words, Pope Leo said:
“To, once again, the young people who are gathered here, I’d like to say that you are the promise of hope for so many of us.”
Later in the address Pope Leo also referred to young people as ‘beacons of hope.’
When we watch or read the news or look around the world about us we often see so many signs of brokenness. Sometimes signs of hope can be shrouded by signs of harm and of fear. And yet the world can be a better place, and our hope is in young people: the young people of Chicago, the young people of Notre Dame School, the young people throughout the world, that with God’s help they can and will change the world with a desire to serve others more than themselves and to be beacons of light in all places where there is darkness.
Let us pray for the young people of our school and of the world! The world needs them, and needs their light and their hope.
