Fr. Ante Vuckovic’s homily at the Youth Festival

date: 04.08.2014.

The central part of the Youth Festival is the Holy Mass that is celebrated by this year’s newly ordained priests and Fr. Ante Vuckovic is giving homilies every night. We are here bringing one part of Fr. Ante that he gave on Sunday, August 3rd: “We people are unusual creatures. We are so unusual that we still wonder whom we are. Wherever we look around, we see a hunger. We are not sufficient to ourselves, wondrous beings, and the most unusual of all that were created. But, when I look into the body, hungry and thirsty, when I look into interior, I see the heart that is hungry and thirsty. It is a heart that needs understanding, acceptance, love and poetry. I look into the mind and it is also hungry, it desires to understand and desires story. Wherever I look, I just see hunger. But, whichever hunger I see, I am thinking that it needs to be quenched. I can only imagine that that is where the secret of creation of this unusual being is. God did not create us with hunger without giving us possibility to quench it. It is not unusual that we people are hungry, but when we know that man is hungry, it is easy for him to receive any food just to eat, and he can even be given a poison instead of the real food. It is understandable that hungry person grabs and eats anything that seems eatable for him, but what cannot be understood is something that the reading of the prophet Isaiah revels us, because in just one sentence we have all of this contained and the mystery of so many failed and destroyed lives: ‘Why spend money on what cannot nourish and your wages on what fails to satisfy?’ Yahweh sees well. Man can in a good way quench his hunger. Again, anew it happens that someone deceives him and betrays him to take something that will not quench his hunger, and even worse, he pays for that with money and sometimes even with his life. How many deceived people are there and they had genuine hunger for love, acceptance, and understanding and yet they were not able to quench it. Afterwards, they fall into the drugs, addictions and whenever I listen to someone’s testimony from Cenacolo community I never have questions or doubts whether they are saying the truth. I have deep conviction that they are saying the truth, but that is not the case with every testimony or story I hear. When I listen to the politicians, I have many questions and I do not believe them always. Even when I listen to us priests, I am still not certain whether we say the things that we lived and those we believe in. When I listen to them, how deeply they fell into, how they left their communities, God’s call is before me like a shining spark: Why do you pay so much for the poison and we can receive such a good food for nothing? It is simple. Isn’t Medjugorje a place where whenever we turn around us we can see how human hungers are quenched in such a wonderful way for free? Tonight’s readings speak to us about that human hunger and speak to us how God sees that hunger. It is not always the same how we see that, how we in the Church understand it and perceive it, or how those who are close to Him see it. This is a good opportunity to look from close what does He really see.”