Search for God's face with innocent hands, pope urges young people

VATICAN CITY (Catholic Online) - Search for the face of God with a pure heart and innocent hands, Pope Benedict XVI said in a Palm Sunday message directed to young people that opened the Catholic Church's observance of Holy Week.

In his homily for the April 1 Palm Sunday Mass, Pope Benedict said that truth and love are "authentic criteria" for life rather than focusing on the drive for "utility and gain, career and success." The "true essence" of the Christian life "has to do with an interior change of life," the pope said. "It demands that I no longer be closed in considering my self-realization as the principal purpose of my life. It demands that I not longer be closed in considering my self-realization as the principle purpose of my life." "It demands" he stressed, "that I give myself freely to an other - for truth, for love, for God, who, in Jesus Christ, precedes me and point out the way." The 22nd World Youth Day was observed in dioceses throughout the world on Palm Sunday. The theme of the 2007 World Youth Day observance was taken from Jesus' words from the Gospel of John: "Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another" (Jn 13:34). Palm Sunday, which commemorates Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem, begins the church's Holy Week that includes the Good Friday re-enactment of Christ's crucifixion and death and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. As well, during this week, the second anniversary of the April 2, 2005, death of Pope John Paul II will be observed. On Monday, the Catholic Church is set to conclude the first phase of its investigation into John Paul's saintliness as part of the examination into the beatification of the late pontiff. The pope stressed that the search for truth and love is not an abstraction, but founded in the desire to know the person of God. Following Jesus Christ, he said, "I enter into the service of truth and love. Losing myself, I find myself." He urged young people not to be "carried here and there by life; not being satisfied with what everyone thinks, says and does." "Be attentive to God, seek God," he added. Beyond having the desire to "look about themselves in search of God, in search of his face," the faithful must be those who approach with innocence and purity. "Innocent hand - hands that are not used for acts of violence. They are hands that are not dirtied by corruption, by bribes," Pope Benedict said. "A pure heart," he said, "does not pretend and does not sully itself with lies and hypocrisy. A heart that remains transparent like water rises up, for it does not duplicity." "If we talk with Jesus, we will ascend and find purification that carry us truly to that height for which man is destined: friendship with God himself," he said. The pontiff pointed to the procession that began the celebration in a sun-filled St. Peter's Square here that joined the assemblage there with "the crowd of disciples who, in festive joy, accompany the Lord in his entrance into Jerusalem." "Like them, we praise the Lord in a loud voice for all the great deeds we have seen," Pope Benedict said, how Christ "brings men and women to renounce the comforts of life and put themselves completely at the service of the suffering; how he gives courage to men and women to oppose violence and lies, to make a place in the world of truth; how he, in secret, leads men and women to do good for other, to bring about reconciliation where there was hate, to create peace where enmity reigned." The procession of palm becomes, he said, a profession of kingship of Jesus Christ as "the king of peace and justice." "Recognizing him as king means accepting him as the one who shows us the way, the one to whom we entrust ourselves and whom we follow," the pope said. "It means accepting his word every day as the valid criterion of our life," he added. "It means seeing in him the authority to whom we submit ourselves." The procession of palms is for us, as it was with the disciples two millennia ago, "an expression of joy," he said, "because we can know Jesus, because he allows us to be his friends and because he has given us the key to life." "The expression of our 'yes' to Jesus and of our availability to go with him wherever he takes us," the pope said, "is a description of the whole Christian existence." He called on the young people and all Christians to be open to the presence of God in their lives. "With the cross, Jesus open wide the door of God, the door between God and men," Pope Benedict said. "He knocks at the door of the world, at the doors of our hearts, which so often and in such great numbers are closed to God." He concluded his Palm Sunday message praying to the Lord to "help us to open the door of our heart, the heart of the world, so that he, the living God, might, in his son, arrive in our time and touch our lives."

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