Message for our Youth from a homily during the closing ceremonies of the 1947 Marian Congress in Ottawa

Archbishop John D’Alton, of Armagh, Irish Primate June 1947

"No path of circumstances is hidden from her anxious care. Go forward, then with determination, o dear young men and young women, vindicate the glory of your Immaculate Mother. In the face of a vicious world prove that young hearts can still be chaste. And oh, how much depends on the genuine active Catholicity of the home!”

In his sermon, a high point of the congress, Archbishop John D’Alton, of Armagh, Irish Primate, said that in this age “of moral anarchy” the world had great need of Mary’s example. She was the ideal mother in the Ideal Home. Today, he said “the home has been invaded by the modern spirit of restlessness and indiscipline which helps to weaken parental authority. ”Then there were the self-styled progressive thinkers who were continually deriding the Catholic ideal of marriage as out of harmony with the trend of modern civilization and who clamored for compassionate marriages, easier divorces, and birth control.

In many countries, the State, against its own best interests, seems bent on joining the conspiracy to hasten the disintegration of the family. It steadily encroaches on the rights and responsibilities of parents in the training of their children and exercises the functions which in God’s design properly belong to them” the Irish Primate declared.