Pope Leo arrived early at Tor Vergata, as if wanting to be as close to the young people as possible. It was not even 8 o'clock in the morning when he crossed the esplanade in his white jeep, but the thousands of boys and girls who had spent the night in sleeping bags and improvised beds did not doze off, they welcomed him with irrepressible joy. More than a million, according to the authorities, the people gathered in the outskirts of Rome - including 20 cardinals, about 450 prelates, including bishops and archbishops, and almost 7,000 priests - for the concluding Mass of the Youth Jubilee for which 850 media workers, including journalists, photographers, cameramen and videomakers, were accredited.
Good morning to the young people
Arriving on stage, before preparing for the liturgy, the Pontiff greeted the young people in several languages and hoped that ‘the great celebration in which Christ has left us His presence in the Eucharist’ would be ‘a truly memorable occasion for each of us’. He concluded: ‘When we are together as the Church of Christ, we follow, we walk together, we live Jesus Christ’.
Looking up
After answering questions from three young men the night before, in his homily, delivered in Italian and partly in Spanish and English, the Pope reversed roles for a moment and asked three questions himself. ‘What really is happiness? What is the true taste of life? What frees us from the ponds of meaninglessness, boredom, mediocrity?’ he asks. And he responded by summarising the ‘many beautiful experiences’ had by all during the past jubilee days: ‘You met among peers from different parts of the world, from different cultures. You exchanged knowledge, shared expectations, dialogued with the city through art, music, IT, sport. At the Circus Maximus, then, approaching the Sacrament of Penance, you received God's forgiveness and asked for his help for a good life.’
The answer is to be found in all these things: ‘the fullness of our existence does not depend on what we accumulate’, says Leo XIV, nor even ‘on what we possess’, it is instead in ‘what we know how to welcome and share with joy’, it is in the love of Christ.
"Buying, hoarding, consuming, is not enough. We need to raise our eyes, to look upwards, to the “things above”, to realise that everything makes sense, among the realities of the world, only to the extent that it serves to unite us with God and our brothers and sisters in charity, making “feelings of tenderness, goodness, humility, meekness, magnanimity”, forgiveness, peace, like those of Christ, grow in us. And in this horizon we will understand better and better what it means that “hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us”. Dear young people, our hope is Jesus'.
Jesus changes our lives
It is ‘the encounter’ with the Risen Christ that changes ‘our life, that illuminates our affections, desires, thoughts’, explained the Pontiff, who took his cue from the First Reading, taken from the Book of Qoeleth, which warns that ‘everything is vanity’ and that every man must leave behind all that he has accumulated, to remember the ‘finiteness of things that pass away’. As did Psalm 90, which ‘proposes to us the image of the grass that sprouts; in the morning it blooms’ and then ‘in the evening it is mown and dries up’. ‘Two strong reminders, perhaps a little shocking, which however should not frighten us’, encourages Leo, because ‘the fragility of which they speak to us’ is ‘part of the wonder that we are’.
The humqn being’s existence is constantly regenerated in love
And again the Pope turned to nature to make it clear that our life is a regeneration of love. Like a meadow ‘made up of slender, vulnerable stems, subject to withering, bending, breaking,’ that regenerates itself with new stems for which ‘generously the first ones become nourishment and fertiliser, with their wear and tear on the ground,’ and renews itself ‘even during the cold months of winter, when everything seems silent,’ because "it prepares to explode, in spring, in a thousand colours.
‘We were made for this. Not for a life where everything is taken for granted and still, but for an existence that constantly regenerates itself in gift, in love. And so we constantly aspire to a “more” that no created reality can give us; we feel a thirst that is so great and burning that no beverage of this world can quench it. Faced with it, let us not deceive our hearts, trying to quench it with ineffective substitutes! Let us rather listen to it!’
It is God who quenches the thirst of the heart
The thirst of the heart is quenched by God, is the Pontiff's summary, and St Augustine makes it clear that ‘the object of our hope’ is not the ‘earth’, nor ‘something that comes from the earth’, things that ‘please us are beautiful’, ‘good’, but are not hope. ‘Seek him who made them, he is your hope,’ said the Bishop of Hippo and the Pope today repeats.
Cultivate friendship with Christ
Hence Leo’s invitation to keep ‘united’ to Christ, to remain ‘in his friendship, always, cultivating it with prayer, adoration, Eucharistic Communion, frequent Confession, generous charity, as the blessed and soon-to-be saints Piergiorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis taught.’
Following their example, to the boys and girls who are now preparing to return to their countries, the encouragement is, therefore, to continue ‘to walk joyfully in the footsteps of the Saviour’ and to involve others with their own fire: ‘Contaminate everyone you meet with your enthusiasm and the testimony of your faith! Have a good journey!’
Tiziana Campisi
Source: Vatican News
