Turning Students Into Saints With St. John Bosco

We cannot make kids love Jesus in the Eucharist. Only God can do that. Pope Paul VI said that people are going to listen to a witness more than they are going to listen to a teacher. The only reason they will listen to their teacher is if their teacher is a witness.

If someone were to sit in a class and say "we believe that this is really, truly, and substantially the Body and Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ - under the form and the matter of bread and wine..." that's good - we need to teach them that - but that is not going to change their hearts and it is not going to change their lives.

A witness is somebody who challenges those individuals to go and see and test it out for themselves. Our Lord is not going to say "Oh, the kids came to see Me and they're really open right now, I'm not going to speak to their heart, I'm going to let them walk away saying 'He's not really here.'"  That's not going to happen. People shouldn't believe what we say. People who believed in Jesus had some type of experience with Him. What we need to be witnesses first and foremost of, is daring them to [seek that] encounter. Constantly asking them:

• "Well, why don't you try it?"
• "You try everything else, why not try this?"
• " Wouldn't it make a huge difference if God was really there?"
• "I mean...if God was really there...wow. That would really change a lot of things."

And then allowing them to see that what we are teaching, we believe, by the way we act.

There are going to be consequences to this. There are going to be consequences for living our Faith. And the consequences are going to be very positive. 

If we look at our children, especially in the middle school age: they are coming from broken families, they're coming from schools where it is very rough and very tough...there's fighting and there is bad language all around them. They are not going to read the [religious] text books for the most part. 

They are coming from situations where God isn't even important and [we] don't even know why their parents decided to put them in CCD. Maybe they wanted the evening off or something. 

So, what they are going to have to see is light. And it is going to be easy for them to see light because they are in darkness...

Our witnessing is not so much, "yeah...this is what we believe and it's worth living" but it is also "It is worth giving everything to. It is worth throwing down your life."

There are four main things that we should be witnesses of:

1. Christ is really present in the Eucharist. That He is really God and that He is really a person and we need to make regular visits to Him. (Our goal is to make our students saints. We only have an hour [or so] to do that...how are we going to do that? That is God's responsibility. We just do the best we can and God will work with that. He will.)
2. The Sacrament of Confession...Satan has managed to desecrate all of the Sacraments with false teachings and half truths, so that most people - especially young people - go to the Sacrament of Confession and commit sacrilegious Confessions. So, their Confession doesn't help sanctify them - it further damns them. Because in order for your Confession to be valid, you have to list the kind and the number. So, what exactly did you commit? "I looked at pornography four times and committed masturbation four times." They have to be specific. A lot of times, young people will say things like "uhhh...I did some bad stuff....with my girlfriend...and uhhh...you know...I lied to my mom..." and they will leave one or two things out. Like "Oh, I told him the majority, I told him the gist." But that is not a valid Confession. That is a sacrilegious Confession. Instead of getting any of your sins forgiven, now you've piled on more sins for mistreating the Holy Sacrament that can have everything erased. It's like you're not really sorry. When you are really sorry you say what it is you are sorry for "I'm sorry I backed into your car," "I am sorry I called you a name..." You are specific when you are sorry about something. And then you promise not to do it again.  A lot of our Confessions are sacrilegious. 
3. Authentic Marian devotion. DAILY ROSARY. The Rosary is a mini-Bible. If they do it correctly and are meditating on the life of Jesus...wow. 15 minutes a day thinking about Jesus's life. That would be a dream come true if a kid did that every single day. It would change his life. We have to be praying it ourselves. Mary will help convert their hearts.
4. Follow the Pope. 

 -- transcribed from this video by Gabriel Castillo: