Helping the young find a 'first life' before they lose themselves in second life

If we totally abandon our celebration of Christian values - and the heroes who sacrificially exemplified them - we leave our young people adrift on a tide of vacuous pop culture. We leave them to worship celebrity, which tells them the best they can achieve is to be well known for being well known.

As a result, many young people try to find creativity in binge drinking and drugs, and some will look for significance through violence. The latter may only be a minority, but that shouldn't stop us from being vigilant and striving to reduce it further.

There is no excuse for the moral evil committed by a violent young man in Finland last week. But we should take this opportunity to look again into the European soul and ask whether adopting a purely secular approach to life - where moral relativism tears away at the fabrics of society starting with the family - is really advancing our culture.

We must stop seeing events like this as isolated, one-off, couldn't-happen-ever-again occurrences, and realise that our young people are looking to us for love, affectionate discipline and help in building positive parameters and a healthy destiny for their lives. We must not fail them.