50TH ANNIVERSARY
	"To Make a World for Free Men"

We owe much to those leaders woho fifty years ago gave structure to the organization of Catholic scouting on the intenational level. The year was 1948. It was not an easy year. Their initiative required prayer and work. Peoples everywhere still reeling from the horror of two World Wars, were then adjusting to another conflict. I was the beginning of the Cold War with a descriptive vocaulary of its own. On thinks of the phrase, Iron Curtain. It described the horrors of the rupture dividing the peoples of eastern and western Europe.

Moreover, fresh technologias were being developed every day designed for kiling millions of the "enemy". Hiroshima and Nagasaki loomed like Dantean nightmares on past and future landscapes.

So in the late forties a few baptized persons came together. Hops was not a stranger to them. A few years earlier, George Bermanos had said the he highest form of hope is despair that has been overcome. It is also worth recalling that in 1946, two years before his death, Bernanos had said in Geneva, "We must make a world or fee men".

Despair is not the ambience for free men. Something of bernanos’s ideal, "We must make a world for free men", informed the vision of those organizing the International Catholic Conference for Scouting. At the very least , the worked for a future less disillusioning than theirs had been. Even more, they dared to cream of freedom and truth an joy. And they believed that Jesus Christs was they key to the freedom of their sons and grandsons.

"For freedom Christ has set us free". St. Paul knew from experience of the truth he wrote to the Galatians in the first century. In Paris during the 1997 World Youth Day, Pope John Paul II proclaimed the same freedom of the baptized to the hundreds of thousands at Champ-de-Mars and to the million plus young people at Loongchamp of August 24^th.

Catholic scouts were present there and heard his message of Chirstian freedom. I saw them in their thousands and gave thanks to God for the innumerable priests and laypeople who made their attendance possible.

They heard a great deal about the freedom of the baptitzed. A freeman is not a disillusioned man. A free man knows himself to be a child of God. He has been reborn by water and the Hoy Spirit. By his very nature, a son of God is filled with wonder and hope. He knows himself to have been entrusted to keep alive the spirit of childhood in the world.

Throughout their journey as Catholic scouts, the young are presented with a new measure of human greatness. They are alert to the beauty of the world. And beauty contains a promise which is always pointing beyond itself. Jesus Christ, "the same, yesterday, today, and forever", is the measure of man.

Those Christians who came together in 1948 also knew the beauty of this world. More significantly, they knew that it points beyond, to the glory of God where the baptized encounter the Risen Lord on the other side of death. Their vision continues to be foundational for the freedom of your sons and grandsons in 1998. It lead them to an unsurpassable hope and joy.

My deepest thanks for helping to "make a world for free men" through Catholic scouting.

Archbishop J. Francis Stafford

President, Pontifical Council for the Laity