Day 2, 28th July 2026, Tuesday
Cathecesis by Fr. József Urbán Sch.P. (assistant general to Asia)
Dear friends,
I would like to begin with your life. Not with a theory — with your life.
You are young. You are growing. And I am sure you know this experience of growth very well. Your horizon is getting wider and wider. You have seen more of the world than you had seen a year ago. You have understood more of life. Maybe you are gaining in languages — like English, which is the language in which we are now trying to understand each other, and which is not the mother tongue of any of us. These are great discoveries. These are great facts of human growth.
And you have passed thresholds. Grades in school. Exams. The passage from secondary school to university, or towards it. Step by step, something is added to what was there before. This kind of growth is real, and it is good.
Let me tell you something personal. When I was seven or eight years old, I remember certain pains in my legs. They came especially in the evening. A special kind of pain — not very heavy, but strong enough to bother you, something like tiredness. I told my father about these pains. And he told me, very understandingly: these are natural pains. These are the pains of growth. Your bones are growing.
It is interesting — I never revisited this. I never looked it up in medical books. I simply believed him. And I think he was right.
I tell you this for two reasons. First: real growth is felt. Sometimes it even aches. Remember this — we will come back to it. And second: I could not interpret my own pain. Someone who loved me gave it a name. Sometimes this is how growth works. We will come back to this too.
Now, together with all this growing, I think there are also questions living in you. Deep questions. Will I fit in? Will I find a space for myself? Am I needed? Can I contribute? Do I have a voice that matters?
And very often these questions take the form of comparison. Am I better? Am I smarter? Am I more beautiful, more acceptable, more to be liked than the others?
I want to be very clear: I am not condemning these concerns. I understand them. They are valid concerns, and I take them seriously. But I invite you to overcome them. To step forward. Not to be stuck in them — especially not to be stuck in comparison.
So: do not compare yourself with others. And do not try simply to fit in — to fit into what already exists, into what you see as existing. Give time. Be patient. Maybe it is impossible for you to see beyond a certain point in your life. That is okay. The future is open — by definition. We never know the future. And this is good news. If you cannot imagine your future, that is a good thing, because the future will be different from anything you imagine. And our faith gives us a fact to stand on: the world belongs to God. If the world belongs to God — all the more so the future.
If you compare at all, compare yourself with yourself. Ask this question: am I growing? Am I more human than I was yesterday? If there is any competition, let it be this one: that my self of tomorrow may be more than my self of today.
But now I have to ask: what kind of growth are we really talking about?
Every now and then we hear terrible news of earthquakes, in different parts of the world. And sometimes, afterwards, people study what went wrong — why one building fell and another, right next to it, remained standing. And there is something striking that engineers have found in many of these cases. Often the structure above the ground stays intact. Many floors, going up high — firm, unbroken. The failure happens somewhere else. It happens at the point where the structure leaves the ground. The earth starts moving, trembling — and it is exactly there, at the base, where the building meets the moving earth, that it becomes weak. It cannot go with the changes.
Keep this image: a structure that keeps everything it has built, but cannot revisit the place where it stands.
Because a building cannot grow. A building can only be added to. New floors, new parts — connected, yes, articulated to what is already there. I would call this augmental growth: layers added onto a base that is never visited again.
A tree is different. A tree does not grow only at its extremities, only by adding new branches. When new branches appear above, the trunk is also growing. It becomes stronger. The tree grows also within, also at the bottom. The parts that came first do not become dead foundations — they remain alive, capable of change, capable of becoming stronger, capable of healing.
I have a word for this: regrowth. Growth that can go back into what already exists. Growth in the layers that seemed finished.
Now — is incremental growth bad, then? No. Adding is good. Learning is adding, experience is adding. The problem is not adding layers. The problem is only adding layers, onto a base you never revisit. That is the building. Human growth — the growth of the whole person — is the tree: it adds, and at the same time it keeps everything alive, including the deepest and oldest parts, including the place where we touch the ground.
There is a word we use for this human growth: maturity.
And here is a simple observation: maturity is not the same as being grown up. Someone can be forty or sixty years old and still be, in many ways — not childlike, which is beautiful, but childish. Being grown up happens to you with time. Maturity does not happen with time.
And I want to go one step further. Maturity is not a state you reach. It is not a diploma. You never arrive at a point where you can say: now I have it, now I can stop. It is better to speak of maturation — a continuous process. In fact, I would say: maturity consists in being constantly in a process of maturation.
There is an old Latin maxim, dear to our tradition: qui non proficit, deficit. Whoever is not going forward is going backward. If you are not in a continuous process of maturation, you are not simply standing still — you are slipping back.
Now, this raises a question. Can I do it? Can I make myself mature?
And here we touch something strange, a paradox that I ask you to hold carefully.
On the one hand: maturation must be wanted. It must be conscious, intentional. You cannot just wake up one morning and say: oh, I am mature — what a surprise! It is impossible. Nobody grows by accident. You have to want it.
On the other hand: I cannot mature myself. There is no specific action I can perform that produces maturity. I cannot manufacture my own growth. Growth is something that, somehow, we receive.
So what is left for us? What is our part? Our part is to create the conditions. To pay attention. To look back at our life. To ask for feedback — to ask others: how do you see me? To let ourselves be accompanied. Personally accompanied — and also accompanied in community. Look around you: this is happening to you right now. You are at a meeting, but you are not in a crowd. You are a person in a community. And in these days we will create small communities, small groups, where you can listen and speak, receive and give. This is communal accompaniment, and personal growth does not happen without it.
And notice something important: your contribution to the community is not something you add later, out of generosity, once your own growth is finished. It is part of your growth. It is impossible to mature without giving.
Saint Paul knew all this. He wrote to the Corinthians: I planted, Apollos watered — but God gave the growth. One person plants, another waters — nobody grows alone, and even together, we do not produce the growth. We prepare the ground. The growth is given.
Let me say it in three words, and please keep these three words: growth is grace.
And now I want to speak about something that belongs to every real growth story, and that we usually prefer not to mention.
Wounds. Failures. Mistakes. Our limitations. Our mistaken choices and their consequences. Wounds inflicted by others — and wounds we have inflicted on ourselves. It is difficult to say which is heavier.
The logic of everything I have said so far tells us: these are parts of life. Mistakes are parts of life. Failures are parts of life. Wounds are parts of life. And I believe that with our wounds, we must avoid two extremes.
The first extreme is denial. To pretend the wounds are not there. To cover them up, to seal them over — like the building that can never revisit its own base. A wound that is denied cannot heal, because healing is regrowth, and there is no regrowth in a place we refuse to visit.
The second extreme is the opposite: to make a cult of our wounds. To put them on the altar. To turn them into our whole identity — to stop the film of our life on its most painful frame, as if that single picture were the whole movie. To make them into something transactional, something we show in order to gain, or in order to silence others.
Between denial and cult, there is a third way — and I choose this word deliberately: to cultivate our wounds. To acknowledge them. To recognize them. To name them. To take care of them.
And let me say one thing very clearly, because it matters. Naming a wound — including a wound that someone else inflicted on you — is not making a cult of it. Naming is the first act of cultivation. Recognition is by its nature relational: something is truly recognized when it can be seen. So do not hide your wounds from yourself. Perhaps do not hide them from others. And especially — do not hide them from Jesus. This, by the way, is what confession really is: not only a washing, but the place where I can accept myself, because I experience acceptance — from Jesus, and from the Church.
And look at Jesus himself. On the risen body of Jesus, the wounds are still there. He showed them. He did not hide them — and he did not weaponize them either. He showed them as signs and sources of love.
This is the horizon for our wounds: that they can be transformed into signs and sources of love. And I want to tell you: this transformation does not wait for the end of time. Healing can begin now. When you fall, when you fail — it is not the end of your journey. Stay there for a moment; from the ground, you see the world from an angle you have never seen before, and you will gain insights you could not gain standing up. And then continue. You can heal. You are called to continue. Jesus calls you to continue. A wound is not the end of the story. A wound is a place calling for regrowth.
I want to add one more word to our vocabulary, maybe the most important one: authenticity. Becoming your true self.
We often understand authenticity as a kind of honesty: what is in my heart is on my lips. I say what I think. Or a little more: I do what I say — walking the talk. These are good things. But authenticity goes beyond them.
Authenticity also asks about effects. What are the effects of what I say, of what I do — in fact, of what I am? How do I influence the people around me: my friends, my family, my community, my school, my city, the Church, humanity? And the deepest form of the question is this: do I generate life? Life in abundance, as Jesus said?
So authenticity has to do with truth and with life. And this is why it is inseparable from vocation. Because my truth is a strange thing: it is deep within me — and at the same time it comes to me from outside. Truth calls me. It calls me to be more than the little myself of today. It calls me towards that full person that I am in God’s dreams. Authenticity means working — really working — on the emergence, the coming-about, of this true self that I am in God’s dreams. Looking deeply into myself; and looking honestly at my effects; and listening to this truth which is in me but arrives from beyond me.
Now let me give you an image for this. We come back to our tree.
When we use the image of the tree, we usually speak of the roots, the trunk, the branches — and then we jump very quickly to the fruits. Be fruitful, bear fruit. And I do not say a word against fruits. But I want to resist the rush to the fruits — because, in a certain way, the fruits are already different from the tree. They come from the tree, but they are not of the tree. They detach; they are carried away. And you know this rush very well: results, grades, achievements, things to show — a life measured only by what can be picked and carried off.
This is why I am more interested in the leaves.
The leaves are also produced by the tree — in a certain sense the leaves are the fruits of the tree. But they do not detach. They stay, and they do something wonderful. They connect the tree — not simply relate it, connect it — to the world around it. Even to the sun. They receive light, something the tree could never produce for itself, and out of this received light they make life for the whole tree. And more: they give something to the environment. They produce oxygen — the very condition for other lives to exist, to flourish, to grow.
Do you see? The leaf is the image of the authentic person. It receives from beyond itself. It keeps its own tree alive. And its effect on the world is that others can breathe.
I love very much the leaves. And — forgive me — I will leave you with the leaves.
Almost. Let me take three short steps to finish.
First step. A tree is a beautiful image, but a tree has one limitation: a tree cannot cultivate itself. So let us pull the camera back. The tree is not standing in a void. It stands in soil — in a garden. And in the second chapter of Genesis it is written that God planted the human being in the garden to cultivate it and to care for it. Cultivate — it is the same root from which we get the word culture. Culture is cultivation done together. And here is the strange dignity of the human being, which no tree has: we are the only creature that is at the same time the tree, the soil, and the gardener. I grow like the tree. I receive like the soil. And I am given the gardener’s task: to cultivate the conditions — in myself and around me — for a growth that I do not manufacture.
And this means something that sounds like a paradox but is simply true: I cannot cultivate myself without cultivating the garden. I take care of myself by taking care of the whole of which I am a part. Isolating myself is not protecting myself — it is cutting myself off from love.
And look around this room for a moment. How many countries, how many languages, how many stories. A garden is never a monoculture — that is exactly why it is fertile. It is true of this room, and it is true of this city.
Second step. If we are also soil, then listen to how Jesus speaks: a sower went out to sow. The seed of the Kingdom is already falling — the Kingdom is near, at hand, at the threshold, its growth already secretly begun. Our task is not to produce the Kingdom. Our task is to become receptive — to cultivate the soil that we are, so the seed can take root in us, among us, in the Church, in the world.
And let me say one thing very clearly here, so that no misunderstanding takes root. Being a Christian in the world does not mean having to be different by being separate — an island, guarded and apart. If you want to be different, be different in this: in dedicating yourself to cultivation. Be different by making the first step. Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium, says that the community of Jesus knows how to take the initiative — to make the first move, because the Lord himself made the first step towards us. This is what it is to follow Jesus: to make the first step in cultivating the garden, so that the garden becomes a place where we are brothers and sisters to all.
Tomorrow you will hear about being a Christian in the world, and the day after, about living in community. I am not going to give those talks. I only wanted to prepare the ground for them. Consider this a seed.
Third and last step. Underneath everything I have said this morning — underneath the comparing, the striving, the fear of not fitting in — I believe there lies one deep desire. The desire for acceptance. The desire to hear, from someone, at least once, spoken truly: it is good that you are.
The philosopher Josef Pieper said that this is what love means: to say to someone, it is good that you exist. And notice — this sentence has no comparative. There is no „better” in it, no „more than.” It is the one recognition that cannot be ranked. It is the word that answers comparison forever.
And it is the first word ever spoken over us. God looked at creation and said: it is good. Jesus says it to you. The Christian community says it to you. And to be a cultivator — to be a member of a community, to be a Christian in the world — is, in the end, exactly this: to say that same creative word to others. It is good that you exist.
In a few minutes you will sit down in small groups. Let me tell you what those groups really are: they are a garden. So be courageous enough to share — you will understand yourself better when you express yourself, and others will tell you things about yourself that you never imagined. And do in that garden the most cultivating thing a human being can do: let someone be truly seen. And perhaps you will hear it — today, here, said to you: it is good that you are.
Thank you.
