"I write to you, young people, too often portrayed as jaded, cynical, disillusioned, pragmatic, but every time I meet you - as the last World Youth Day, GMG, in Madrid - I'm seeing you always cleaner, healthier, freer and more real than the media and some clichés of adults would think ." It’s starting with these words, the 2011 Pastoral Letter, of the Bishop of Rimini, Francesco Lambiasi, which is entitled Young people, where is happiness?

This letter’s author is thinking especially about the young people, but this reading is also recommended to anyone that in several ways has to work with young people. This text is very dense and deep, and it finds its source in the author’s rich humanity and spirituality. He was a long time Theology professor in Rome, Seminary Rector at Anagni, General Assistant of the Azione Cattolica Italiana and now, for some years, Bishop of Rimini, little town of Romagna.
Then, a "pastoral" letter but directed to young people, because a Church that looks to its commitment in this time in history can not but take to heart the educational dimension of his thinking and his actions. It is a letter that always maintains a direct tone, urgent, the tone of one who has to communicate a message that can not be delayed even reach its destination.
And the news is this: happiness is not an illusion or a mirage, not a vain aspiration placed in the heart of man, but doomed to failure, so it would be wiser "contentment". Happiness is a journey, a companion, is a vocation, is an appeal.

Gospel and happiness

After a brief introduction, the text is divided into 9 little chapters: What's going on? Can a Christian be happy? Gospel: see under Happiness, The anxiety of the future, It is time to wake up, Where is God when we suffer? The happiness of Easter, The joy of being Christian, There is happiness. The starting point is the record that in contemporary culture we are witnessing to a loss of desire, that is a sort of general apathy about the meaning of existence, primarily due to a kind of overdose of "goods", which threaten to disappear from our lives, the central issue of "good". Especially from  the young people's lives.

What remains of happiness in that? The public discourse, the advertising to be clear, continues unabated and undisturbed to put the first point of the recipe for happiness "the success", but there are so many contraindications and adverse effects of this suggestion, and one can only marvel that the adult class has not yet decided to awaken from its state of permanent disposal of educational care and has not really taken seriously as a "consumer society" in the end do nothing more than consume the entire society, starting with the youngest and least vaccinated by all this talk.

The Bishop Francesco does not fit in this game. And so he decides to communicate what gives flavor and know to our existence, what lights and shines with joy and happiness: our Christian faith.
"Christianity - he articulates well - announces the happiness." Nothing less. And not at the margin of his speeches and sermons. No to the heart of his own truth, the heart of the creed. The author of this pastoral letter retraces very well the highlights items of the "creed of Christians" - that we recite on Sundays - as "eight chapters of perfect joy."

And here that happiness is this coming to know the lover and the blessing divine company of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, which places us in a community of brothers and sisters, all called to make a beautiful, holy, clean reality in our lives and in the life of the world. Who believes in this doesn’t fear sin, neither death: he knows that there is the forgiveness and that the trajectory of his action is beyond the headstone in the cemetery that is awaiting each one of us!

The enemies of Christian Happiness

Our reader doesn’t think that the Bishop Francesco is missing of a good dose of realism and a healthy sense of things. For this reason he dedicates several pages of his letter to enumerate the main enemies - so said– of believer happiness. And first of all is the anxiety of the future, the nervousness, the worry, the fear, the temptation to make the goods with the good of life and his full human development. True, real temptations. Attitudes, however, that always create a sense of emptiness, a hole up and shut themselves about themselves that lead eventually to a fight  against the life for fear of the future and death.

Instead, the believer is one who knows how to commit his lives on that measure’s parameter that Jesus has marked with his life and his words: who loses is winning, the giver is earning, who gives himself is rising and living.

But there aren’t only these external concerns threatening the believer’s happiness, there are also forms of interior evil today's more difficult to hear and locate. That the Church's spiritual tradition has identified as "deadly sins": pride, envy, anger, greed, gluttony, lust, sloth. The meditations that the Bishop offers to each of these vices deserve careful consideration.

Suffering and evil

It could not miss at this point a serious and thoughtful quarrel with the objection perhaps more acute as possible against the Christian proclamation of a chance of real happiness. The objection of own and others' suffering, the objection of the innocent’s suffering, the objection to the destruction that often comes from nature that surrounds us. With a gentle touch, the Bishop-Theologian remembers that the Christian experience - the experience of Jesus himself - is no stranger to the reality of pain, of suffering and tears. The God we believe is not a God incapable of suffering: He is a God that knows how to suffer, He is a God who even when does not save us from pain, save us in the pain, He is a God whose creation is not already accomplished . He is a God who proclaims in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the news of a future fulfillment of history, where every tear will be wiped away, and what now appears visible only as a shadow will appear in its truth.

For this reason, the most corroborant news of the happiness of those who believe is the proclamation of Easter: the death has surrendered to God! "At Easter changes everything: the sin is forgiven, the pain is not despair, death is not the tunnel that leads into the precipice of nothingness, but the ramp that leads into life forever. At Easter comes the certainty that life is not for death, but death to life. What you do not live to suffer, but suffer to live."

The joy of being Christian

And finally the Bishop Francesco gives us a truly memorable page, a public praise of the Christian faith. He wants, in fact, make it very light on what defines as a humble, grateful pride of being a Christian. Listen to him: "Today is the time to come witness without complex of superiority or inferiority, without intolerance and without shame, the joy of being Christians. The joy of knowing and of being children of the Father: not orphans or homeless, not slaves or mercenaries, but children-children, loved, pre-selected candidates and to eternal life. The consoling truth that we are brothers of Christ, his followers and witnesses, grafted in him as branches in which flows the life of the divine life."

I think that's the gesture that today's young adults are waiting by us believers: a chance to experience the encounter with Christ is not just a matter of tradition or just the head, but a truth which is proved by our eyes, our hands, our legs, our whole life. There's too much sadness around (the loss of libido, which has been already said) and maybe there's too much sadness in our own ecclesial communities: often in repetitive patterns and rhythms, self in languages ​​and basic choices, dull and colorless in the celebrations and gatherings.
We need of Christians adults, educators, touched by God - as expressed by Pope Benedict XVI - and therefore able to scratch the indifference or the strangeness of others in regard to the proclamation of the Gospel.

Just as moving are the testimonies that close the 2011 pastoral letter sent by Bishop to his  Diocese of Rimini - evidence that happiness is still possible. Today. You. For all. For young people, especially.

Armando Matteo
Via Aurelia Antica, 284 - 00165 Roma