FOURTH UNIT
In this step it is important for the youth to recognize the transcendence of good choices.
We will help them to delve into the difficulty of choosing what is best for them, and discuss how sin wounds the heart.
They will learn to recognize these wounds and the tools to prevent them, which are grace and the virtues.
The good news is that these wounds are not incurable. God, in His Son Jesus Christ, is the doctor capable of healing our wounds with the best medicine: love.
• The order and fundamental value of Creation. The intrinsic finality of Creation and of human persons.
• Unhappiness or the decay of the intrinsic finality of Creation and of human persons as consequences of disorder and dis-integration. Enslaved freedom, fundamental factor of disorder and dis-integration.
• The recuperation of the order of life and its profound meaning. The insufficiency of one’s own light and reason to recuperate the order and meaning of life.
• The integration of sexuality depends on the discovery of the true light, capable of illuminating my life. Darkness as the incapacity to integrate my sexuality, which forms part of me. The immediate effect of the darkness that dwells in me is that of not viewing the person in an integral way, and it can lead to reductive visions of the person: pansexualism, hedonism, suppression of modesty, separation between love and sexuality or between love and procreation.
• Chastity understood as a light capable of enabling me to love in an integral way.
• Reasons for the destructive consequences of lovelessness: love, ultimate end of all my capacities. The dangers of hardness of heart. Improperly-oriented forms of love: narcissism, auto-eroticism, masturbation.
• Analysis of one’s own experience of love: where do I put my love? What ends up destroying me?
• Remedies for lovelessness: purity, modesty, intimacy.
• Happiness as fullness of love in the soul. Human love shaped by the life of God: charity. The blessedness of the pure of heart. Christ: a good doctor, a good teacher.
• The virtues, motors of a life that is directed toward fulfillment. The distinction between values and virtues. Definition of virtue. The virtues as a means in order not to succumb. The effects of virtue.
• Cardinal virtues, theological virtues.
• Need for grace for the acquisition of the virtues.
• Sin as rejection of the gift of God. Consequences of sin for one’s own holiness and freedom.
WORKING MATERIAL