Was it a success? Absolutely. We are talking about the World Youth Day during the Jubilee year that took place in Rome. Leo XIV’s first one.
More than a million people in the expanse of Tor Vergata, some reporter wrote that it was as if the whole of Naples had moved there. But in reality other than Naples, with all respect, they were young people who had come from all over the world to be together and meet the Pontiff.
Already in this there is something great, and not only in the quantity, but in bringing into a material and symbolic unity so many differences, a unity of values that overcome walls, barriers to the Other, hatreds, violence. For one Day Love, the founding Love of Christianity, won over everything.
But Prevost, his old secular name, the man of the two Americas, the one celebrating the star-studded West and the one from the South knocking hard on the rich world to cry out its inequality, what did he have to say to these young people?
The first thought was for the peers in Gaza and Ukraine, those who suffer and die every day devoured by the ferocity of real wars. And it could only be so for a Pope who debuted on May 8 with the word Peace repeated like a dirge, like a warning, like a duty, like a necessity.
But then a look at today’s world, what it offers, what it demands. Prevost is also an economist, an expert in Artificial Intelligence, and he knows that without knowledge and training you end up at the bottom rungs of the planet’s ladder. I want to read in your eyes the restlessness, the never settling for the most comfortable or easiest solutions, he said. A powerful message, a push for ambition that seems almost secular, somewhat reminiscent , mutatis mutandis and without offending the sensibilities of any believer, of that famous “be hungry” of Steve Jobs.
The truth is that Pope Leo XIV is already a great pope because he has shown that he knows how to interpret our time. A Church dropped into history as it is being made and not just the crystallized history of our Western spirituality. Coming to the practical but important things, everything went well from an organizational point of view, Mayor Gualtieri said that when all institutions cooperate Rome becomes caput mundi again. This is how democracy should work, hopefully it was not an illusion that lasted the space of a day…that of Youth.
The article Beautiful day comes from TheNewyorker.
