Loving Human Love

Crossing the Threshold of Hope
Pope John Paul II (1994)

It is [the] vocation to love that naturally allows us to draw close to the young. As a priest, I realized this very early. I felt almost an inner call in this direction. It is necessary to prepare young people for marriage, it is necessary to teach them love. Love is not something that is learned, and yet there is nothing else as important to learn! As a young priest, I learned to love human love. This has been one of the fundamental themes of my priesthood – my ministry in the pulpit, in the confessional, and also in my writing. If one loves human love, there naturally arises the need to commit oneself completely to the service of “fair love,” because love is fair, it is beautiful.

After all, young people are always searching for the beauty in love. They want their love to be beautiful. If they give in to weakness, following models of behavior that can rightly be considered a “scandal in the contemporary world” (and these are, unfortunately, widely diffused models), in the depths of their hearts they still desire a beautiful and pure love. This is true of boys as it is of girls. Ultimately, they know that only God can give them this love. As a result, they are willing to follow Christ, without caring about the sacrifices this may entail.