Cardinal Proposes a Spiritual GPS for Youth Day Goers

Suggests Tuning to 3 Satellites

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MADRID, Spain, AUG. 17, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga is recommending a “spiritual GPS” for young people in Madrid for World Youth Day. It should be tuned to the Word of God, the Bread of Life, and the Virgin Mary, the cardinal suggested.

The Honduran prelate made this recommendation today when he offered the first of three catecheses that he will be presenting for World Youth Day participants.

Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga, also the president of Caritas Internationalis, based his catechesis on an examination of the foundations of faith.

He called young people to “build on rock, listening to the Word and putting it into practice.”

Only in this way can we “be living stones that love and defend life, and that build the community that is the Church,” the cardinal said. And this is possible because “although we here this morning are from different countries and different cultures, we have the same faith, which makes the construction solid.”

The cardinal went on to analyze the effects that an absence of foundations has on the contemporary world.

“If the point of reference is no longer God, society is disoriented,” the cardinal affirmed. “And it is striking that a world such as the present one — which has such advanced technology for orientation as the GPS — is disoriented.”

Witnesses of the faith

Cardinal Maradiaga concluded his catechesis by exhorting young people at World Youth Day to “be witnesses of the faith and to live a Truth that is not isolated from life, to be established in the faith, which is the source that gives us reasons to live, to fight, to love, to have peace, to be happy — because happiness is not obtained by seeking it, but by making others happy.”

“Faith is the foundation of certainties at a moment in which that which lasts is not fashionable,” he said, “and in which they wish to make us believe that faith is something that can be dispensable.”

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