Colleen Carroll Campbell has nailed it in her most recent article on the New York Times Papal Visit blog.

They [young people] are hungry for God. They are seeking transcendent truth and reliable moral guidance. And a growing number of them have come to believe that they can find both in an unreserved embrace of their Catholic faith and its most demanding moral teachings.

These young Catholics do not admire Benedict in spite of his message, but because of it. While many leaders today regard the young as bundles of hormones incapable of sacrifice or self-restraint, Benedict views them as souls longing for goodness and God. He tells them that the restlessness they feel — the persistent longing that no amount of money, power, or pleasure can seem to satisfy — is not a curse. It is a reminder that they were created for more than the consumption of goods and satisfaction of appetites. You were created for love, Benedict tells them, the kind of love that originates in God and spills over into service to others.

Yes! I often have discussions about this very matter with my friends, one in particular who thinks that people are incapable of self-mastery, sacrifice, nor virtue: Christ teaches the exact opposite, and the Pope faithfully witnesses to Christ Himself when he shows young people that they can live a life full of meaning, full of hope, full of faith, and full of love: Only in sincerely giving ourselves can we truly find ourselves.

This message of true hope is what we long for, and it is found in Christ and His Church; Christ loves every person and knocks on the doors of their hearts, offering everything that is good and beautiful to them, and taking nothing away except that which hurts them.

From Pope Benedict speaking to the youth:

Have you noticed how often the call for freedom is made without ever referring to the truth of the human person? Some today argue that respect for freedom of the individual makes it wrong to seek truth, including the truth about what is good. In some circles to speak of truth is seen as controversial or divisive, and consequently best kept in the private sphere. And in truth’s place – or better said its absence – an idea has spread which, in giving value to everything indiscriminately, claims to assure freedom and to liberate conscience. This we call relativism.

But what purpose has a “freedom” which, in disregarding truth, pursues what is false or wrong? How many young people have been offered a hand which in the name of freedom or experience has led them to addiction, to moral or intellectual confusion, to hurt, to a loss of self-respect, even to despair and so tragically and sadly to the taking of their own life? Dear friends, truth is not an imposition. Nor is it simply a set of rules. It is a discovery of the One who never fails us; the One whom we can always trust. In seeking truth we come to live by belief because ultimately truth is a person: Jesus Christ. That is why authentic freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in; nothing less than letting go of self and allowing oneself to be drawn into Christ’s very being for others (cf. Spe Salvi, 28).

(via American Papist)

Christ our Hope, Thy Kingdom come!