Salt and light

by Editor · June 3, 2002

This week we report that 100 young people from South Africa and Botswana will form the official delegation of the Southern African Catholic Bishops� Conference to the World Youth Day in Toronto. Many others will travel to Toronto privately or as part of parish youth groups.

For South African participants, the setting of this year�s World Youth Day will have special resonance. Toronto is a multi-ethnic city that has often been presented as a model of diversity co-existing in harmony.

The Catholic youth that will gather in Toronto�several hundred thousand of them�will doubtlessly discuss and celebrate the imperative for peace, concord and reconciliation in their many forums.

References to the youth as “the future” usually are tired clich�s. However, at the gathering in Toronto will be committed young Catholics, many of whom are indeed tomorrow�s decision-makers and opinion-formers in their churches and societies. What they are going to experience over five days in late July will hopefully imbue them with a new idealism�at a time when that word has become sadly scorned.

Galvanised by their invigorated faith, they hopefully will inject their idealism in their respective countries.

In a letter for World Youth Day written last year, Pope John Paul encouraged the youth to hold fast to that idealism: “Do not be content with anything less than the highest ideals! Do not let yourselves be dispirited by those who are disillusioned with life and have grown deaf to the deepest and most authentic desires of their heart.”

The pope, whose charisma is sure to touch the Catholic youth as much as it so famously did at the Youth Day in Rome two years ago, gave this year�s event the theme “You are the salt of the earth� You are the light of the world”, taken from Matthew 5:13-14.

In this context, salt symbolises the call to preserve the faith, while the light represents the desire for truth, the edification of our faith and our apostolic mission to spread it.

May the local youth travelling to Toronto return with an abundance of salt and enough light to illuminate our region.