ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV urged hundreds of thousands of young people on Saturday to have the courage to make radical choices to do good, as he presided over his first big encounter with the next generation of Catholics during the highlight of the Vatican’s 2025 Holy Year.
Leo encountered a sea of people as he arrived by helicopter at the Tor Vergata field on Rome’s outskirts for a vigil service of the Jubilee of Youth. Hailing from early 150 countries, the pilgrims had set up campsites on the field for the night, as misting trucks and water cannons spritzed them to cool them down from the 30C (85F) temperatures.
Leo displayed his fluency in speaking to the kids in Spanish, Italian and English about the dangers of social media, the value of true friendship and the need to have courage to make radical choices like marriage or religious vows.
“Friendship can really change the world. Friendship is a path to peace,” he said. “How much the world needs missionaries of the Gospel who are witnesses of justice and peace!”
But history's first American pope also alerted them to some tragic news: Two young people who had made the pilgrimage to Rome had died, one reportedly of cardiac arrest, while a third was hospitalized, Leo told the crowd during the vigil service.
Leo was to return to the field for an early morning Mass on Sunday morning to close out the celebration.
Rome welcomes the throngs
For the past week, these bands of young Catholics from around the world have poured into Rome for their special Jubilee celebration, in a Holy Year in which 32 million people are expected to descend on the Vatican to participate in a centuries-old pilgrimage to the seat of Catholicism.
The young people have been traipsing down cobblestoned streets in color-coordinated T-shirts, praying the Rosary and singing hymns with guitars, bongo drums and tambourines shimmying alongside. Using their flags as tarps to shield them from the sun, they have taken over entire piazzas for Christian rock concerts and inspirational talks, and stood for hours at the Circus Maximus to confess their sins to 1,000 priests offering the sacrament in a dozen different languages.
“It is something spiritual, that you can experience only every 25 years,” said Francisco Michel, a pilgrim from Mexico. “As a young person, having the chance to live this meting with the pope I feel it is a spiritual growth.”
A mini World Youth Day, 25 years later
It all has the vibe of a World Youth Day, the Catholic Woodstock festival that St. John Paul II inaugurated and made famous in Rome in 2000 at the very same Tor Vergata field. Then, before an estimated 2 million people, John Paul told the young pilgrims they were the “sentinels of the morning” at the dawn of the third millennium.
Officials had initially expected 500,000 youngsters this weekend, but Leo and organizers from the stage said the number could reach 1 million. The Vatican didn't immediately provide a final estimate.
“It’s a bit messed up, but this is what is nice about the Jubilee,” said Chloe Jobbour, a 19-year-old Lebanese Catholic who was in Rome with a group of more than 200 young members of the Community of the Beatitudes, a France-based charismatic group.
She said, for example, that it had taken two hours to get dinner at a KFC overwhelmed by orders Friday night. The Salesian school that offered her group housing is an hour away by bus. But Jobbour, like many in Rome this week, didn’t mind the discomfort: It’s all part of the experience.
“I don’t expect it to be better than that. I expected it this way,” she said, as members of her group gathered on church steps near the Vatican to sing and pray Saturday morning before heading out to Tor Vergata.
Romans inconvenienced, but tolerant
Those Romans who didn't flee the onslaught have been inconvenienced by the additional strain on the city's notoriously insufficient public transport system. Residents are sharing social media posts of outbursts by Romans at kids flooding subway platforms and crowding bus stops that have delayed and complicated their commutes to work.
But other Romans have welcomed the enthusiasm the youngsters have brought. Premier Giorgia Meloni offered a video welcome, marveling at the “extraordinary festival of faith, joy and hope” that the young people had created.
“I think it’s marvelous,” said Rome hairdresser Rina Verdone, who lives near the Tor Vergata field and woke up Saturday to find a gaggle of police outside her home as part of the massive, 4,000-strong operation mounted to keep the peace. “You think the faith, the religion is in difficulty, but this is proof that it’s not so.”
Verdone had already made plans to take an alternate route home Saturday afternoon, that would require an extra kilometer (half-mile) walk, because she feared the “invasion” of kids in her neighborhood would disrupt her usual bus route. But she said she was more than happy to make the sacrifice.
“You think of invasion as something negative. But this is a positive invasion,” she said.
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AP reporter Paolo Santalucia contributed to this story.
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Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press
