HONG KONG (SE): Two teenage girls, aged 16 and 14, who were secondary four and two students respectively, plunged to their death from a Shau Kei Wan building on May 18. The deceased students studied at St. Paul’s Secondary School in Happy Valley.
Expressing concern over the suicidal tendency among the tenagers, Jesuit Father Baptista Marciano from Wah Yan College, Kowloon, wrote, “This is perhaps the saddest news I have ever heard about our Catholic schools. The problem seems to be that we tend to tell our students that they must not do this, they cannot do this and such like. But we forget our gospel from the Fifth Sunday of Easter: “By this shall every one know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another as I have loved you” [John 13.34-35].
The Standard, an English daily, quoted sources saying “the two were apparently ‘lovers’, and one of them had been airing her grievances within the relationship to a social worker lately…” Father Marciano wonders, “if the two girls were shown unconditional Christ-like love. Some people may have thought that in future these girls would change their orientation!”
Paraphrasing a popular song, I love you just the way you are, Father Marciano wrote, “that means I love you now, not in future when you have changed. We are a Church that must be noted for our love, more than our doctrine or morals. We are not noted for our love.”
He remarked that in our teenage years, our feelings can be especially confusing. “I remember the first time I fell in love. The feeling was beyond anything I had felt before. Luckily for me the Church did not tell me I must not feel such,” the priest commented.
“In Mark 10:21 Jesus says ‘You lack one thing.’ We the Church, I believe, lack one thing, and that is unconditional love. We are in the habit of telling others what they should not do; indeed we might even sometimes tell them ‘not to feel’ the way they feel.”
Concluding his letter of concern, Father Marciano wrote, “I wish to stress what Jesus said in John 13:34-35: ‘People will know you are my disciples if you love each other as I have loved you,’ i.e., unconditionally, without limit, incomparably. The Church should try to practice this type of love, now and always.”
