With World Youth Day fast approaching, and after Tuppence’s vision of the legacy of the event, I thought I’d quickly muse on the need for young people to feel they belong and what we as a Church can do about it.

I don’t know about you, but I made my Confirmation when I was 15 – not 8 as it is today. Now, I understand why the Sacrament was moved back before First Holy Communion and I agree that having the gifts of the Spirit to help one understand the beauty of the Eucharist is a good idea. But I think that moving it away from the teenage years has also left a gap that needs filling.

You see, I saw Confirmation as me “confirming” my Faith as being my Faith. Not just that of my parents or my friends, but mine. I know that’s not what the sacrament was about, but that was one of the things I got from it. This possession aspect was quite important to me as a youngling as I needed to make a decision as to whether I was going to follow Christ because my parents told me to, or because I wanted to. I needed to decide whether I was still going to go to Mass every week even when I moved out of home and didn’t have Dad kicking me out of bed in the morning and into the car!

Because I saw this Sacrament as being the first one I was old enough to understand and agree to, I saw it as being a decision I was making. And being able to choose my own name for that just re-emphasised it for me. I made the decision and I stand by it.

How many of today’s youth can say the same? How many of them are reaching those tender years when the propensity to question absolutely everything that they see overrides any feelings of loyalty or tradition? Put another way, I think the Church should seriously look at what it is doing (or not doing) for 15-16 year olds throughout the country, because they are not being asked to make a bold, public, once-off, special, Sacramental decision about whether their Faith is for them any more. It’s like they never “confirmed” the decision made by their parents on their behalf as babies – i.e. to follow Christ and His Church.

So, is there not a risk with a whole bunch of fired-up young people returning home without this grounding in their Faith – this basic decision point which they can anchor their young adult lives to – that when things cool off, the legacy of their experiences in Sydney may be diminished by their lack of decisiveness early on?

I’m not suggesting coming up with a new Sacrament, but I would like to hear some strong arguments for why Confirmation should stay in its current position – i.e. before First Holy Communion. I really think that gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, fear of the Lord and the fruits of charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity are needed by our teenagers now, more than ever.

Maybe it’s a matter of keeping Confirmation where it is, but having a refresher course for 15-year olds might be a good idea. Maybe along the lines of when your parents go to sell something on Trade Me or in a garage sale – something you were given a long time ago, but you no longer use – and just the very threat of losing it makes you rediscover how much you liked that thing, and you promise to use it more etc.

Because right now, from where I sit, plenty of teenagers have left these gifts wrapped up, and the fruits are spoiling…

I briefly vented on this in one of the comments I made on Ox’s post, but I wanted to elaborate on it as I’m still fuming over it.

There has been plenty in the media lately talking about matters of unborn life and death. Ox covered some of it, so did The Captain. For me though, I look at all this stuff in the media and society in general, and it all seems to keep coming back to something along the lines of:

“I have the right to choose” or “it’s my choice”.

So, let’s look at that shall we?

Last year I wrote about the ridiculous label that is “pro-choice” as it is used in the common vernacular – i.e. as being the opposite to pro-life. It’s just stupid as the opposite of “pro-life” is either “pro-death” or “anti-life”. But aside from giving society as a whole a grammar lesson, I’ll move on…a bit.

See, the way I see it, I am absolutely pro-choice. God gave me and you and everyone out there the gift of freewill and with that comes the ability to make choices. Where I differ from the abortion-is-my-right-so-is-choosing-my-baby’s-gender-and-eye-colour brigade (who need to look at shortening their name! ), is in which choices are actually ones I am able to be pro.

Look at the Church’s model for these decisions. When the Pope stated that the Church does not have the power to ordain women (please don’t go off on that tangent – I use it as an example only!), what he was saying was “we don’t have the power to make this choice.” A choice implies there is more than one option to pick from. From the Church’s point of view, there isn’t more than one option on the table. It’s not something where the Church gets to choose – the choice has already been made from much higher up!

The same goes, in my opinion, for matters of unborn life and death. If we take the example of the girl from Ox’s story, and she sounds pretty representative of the vast majority of abortion candidates in our fair country, she did have a choice – whether or not to have sex in the first place. Once she makes that choice, that’s it. She can’t “undo” the choice. She can’t go back and “undo” the sex part, just like she can’t undo the consequences of that choice. Even if she has an abortion, that doesn’t undo the choice she already made to have sex in the first place!!! Without having Marty McFly’s De Lorean, a flux capacitor and a disrespect for the space-time continuum, none of us can undo the choices we make. It’s as simple as that.

The crux of my complaint is that too many people look at the consequences of a choice they’ve already made and get all confused into thinking now they have a choice to make. Ehhhh! Wrong! You already made your choice. In this example, when you chose to have sex, that was the part where you had all the freedom in the world to exercise your God-given right to choose!

Why do we shy away from this? Why does anyone who states that more people should choose not to have sex with anyone but their spouse get written off as a nutter? It’s not impossible – it’s totally possible and is the best way to go! So many of the problems in this area would be removed or GREATLY diminished if people just stayed faithful and controlled themselves a bit better!!!

Some of you may already be chomping at the bit to start typing a comment that starts with “what about women who have been raped – where was their choice?” and things along that line. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m sure someone out there can provide better stats than I can with regards to the tiny minority of the abortions executed last year that were due to rape or incest, but I’m talking about the vast, vast, VAST majority of these deaths that are related to a clear choice to have sex and the subsequent “inability” to deal with the consequences.

I think that those of us who have successfully made this choice need to be out there explaining that it’s not as hard as the media would have you think, and that the end result is so much better and worry-free than the alternative. That’s the choice that we should all be pro – the other ones down the line simply shouldn’t be an option!