Only Jesus is capable of answering your deep questions, bishop tells young people in Argentina

The Bishop of San Nicolás (Argentina), Bishop Hugo Santiago, encouraged the more than a thousand young people gathered over the weekend in his diocese and told them that only Jesus is capable of answering their deepest questions.

“You only find your identity and the meaning of your life in Jesus, only He elucidates your mystery, only He can answer your questions of meaning: ‘where do I come from?’, ‘how should I live?’, ‘where am I going?’”, said the prelate to the more than a thousand young people in the Sanctuary of the Virgin of the Rosary of San Nicolás, who participated in the Closing Mass of the 2nd Regional Youth Meeting of the Coastal Region.

This region is made up of the dioceses of Concordia, Gualeguaychú, Rafaela, Rosario, San Nicolás, Santa Fe, Paraná and Venado Tuerto. Their delegations met from October 10 to 12 in San Nicolás, with different activities, workshops and celebrations, under the motto “Your gaze ignites our hope.”

In his sermon, the bishop highlighted that only Jesus “can answer those profound questions and tells you: ‘Like me, you are not the result of chance, you come from my Father who loves you and his first act of love towards you was to tell you ‘I want you to live’, and that love has sustained you in existence to this day. How should I live? The answer is the life of Jesus; you have to live like Him, have his feelings and gestures.”

“Where am I going? You are going towards the House of the Father God; since baptism a happy life beats in your heart that will not be cut short by death. You are son, brother and lord, this is your identity: Son of God, brother of others and lord of things,” he continued.

“There are only two paths”

The Argentine bishop then specified that in life a young man has to “open his eyes and ask God for grace, because there are only two paths: one, which is a false promise of happiness that ends in frustration; and another, which is the true one and consists of giving one’s life to find it.”

“The Church calls the false promise of happiness that ends in frustration ‘idols’, because they resemble God, in the sense that they have the ability to make you organize your entire life around them, but they cannot give you the happiness that they promise, they are: money, pleasure and power taken as ends,” he continued.

“A little money is needed to live with dignity, life offers us legitimate pleasures and power is a service. The lie is when you take them as ends, that is when they seem like happiness, but end in frustration,” he warned.

Bishop Santiago also said that “the path to true happiness for us and for the community with which we live was indicated by Jesus and is paradoxical: ‘He who seeks his life will lose it (it is the path of idols); but whoever loses his life for Me and the Gospel, will find it’ (Mt. 16:25).”

“What is it about losing life to gain it? It is when we have the grace to come out of ourselves, do the will of God and love our brothers: that gives joy, makes us valuable, fulfills us as people and as a community,” he said.

The bishop also pointed out that “when you open yourself to God by meditating on the Word of Jesus, little by little you will realize that only Jesus has words that fill your heart, that are light in your eyes, strength in your steps, help in every need, words that fill your soul until you say like Peter: ‘Where are we going to go Lord, if only you have words of eternal life?’ (Jn. 6, 68).”