World Youth Alliance

The WYA Declaration on the Human Person explores the question “Who am I?,” or “Who is the human person?” Drafted in 2002 for World Youth Day Toronto, Canada, the declaration was presented to Pope John Paul II.

We, young people of all nations, in solidarity with one another, believe that every human being has intrinsic and inalienable dignity that begins at conception and extends to natural death. This dignity, the most precious endowment of the human person, is inviolable. The dignity of the human person must be cherished in custom and protected by law. We recognize, celebrate, and pledge ourselves to defend the intrinsic dignity of every human person.

At the same time, as young people seeking our vocations, we ask ourselves, “Who am I?”

We know that the human person is free. Yet freedom, exercised solely for selfish or self-assertive ends, is radically incomplete.

We believe that the freedom of the human person is most fully and rightly lived in the gift of ourselves to others.

In the act of self-gift, the human person answers the question “Who am I?”, through the experience of love. Love is the experience of freedom lived for the good of the other, the goods that make for genuine human flourishing. Thus, true love, freely given and received, is the experience of the transcendent which fulfills and completes every human being within the human family.
http://www.wya.net/