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By Gudrun Schultz

VATICAN CITY, June 7, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Young people must be taught that Christianity is “a big ‘yes’ to love and to life,” Pope Benedict XVI said Monday in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome, during the inauguration of the diocesan ecclesial congress.

Young people and adolescents, he said, “must be disabused of the widespread prejudice that Christianity, with its commandments and its prohibitions, places too many obstacles to the joy of love, and in particular that it prevents the full enjoyment of the happiness that man and woman find in their mutual love.”Â

“The Ten Commandments are not a series of ‘no’s’, but a big ‘yes’ to love and to life. Human love must be purified, it must mature and go beyond its own limits in order to become truly human, to be the origin of true and lasting joy, to respond to that demand for eternity it carries within itself and which it cannot relinquish without betraying itself. This is the fundamental reason for which love between man and woman is fully realized only in marriage.”
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  The Holy Father emphasised that “educating new generations in the faith is a great and fundamentally important task that involves the entire Christian community,” one that has become “particularly difficult” today and, hence, is “even more important and urgent.”

The “certainty and joy of being loved by God must, in some way, be made palpable and concrete for each of us, and especially for the young generations who are entering the world of faith,” he said.

The theme of truth “must occupy a central position,” he said. In the faith “we welcome and accept the Truth that our minds cannot fully understand, that they cannot posses.” This “enables us to arrive at the Mystery in which we are immersed and to rediscover in God the definitive meaning of our existence.”

“Scientific progress,” the Pope went on, “is often presented as opposed to the affirmations of the faith, giving rise to confusion and making it more difficult to accept Christian truth…Dialogue between faith and reason, if conducted sincerely and firmly, makes it possible to gain a more effective and convincing vision of the rationality of faith in God – not in any God but in the God Who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ – and to show how the fulfillment of all authentic human aspirations lies in Jesus Christ Himself.”
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(With files from the Vatican Information Service.)