Pope Leo XIV shivers hundreds of thousands of young Catholics at the youth festival of the holy year

Hundreds of thousands of young Catholics spilled in a large field on the outskirts of Rome on Saturday from the point of view of the weekend of the holy year of the Vatican 2025: a vigil, a sleep feast in the open air and a morning mass celebrated by Pope Leo XIV This marks his first big meeting with the next generation of Catholics.

Leo arrived as a helicopter while the sun was lying on the Tor Vergata field and immediately climbed my Potemobile with an open top for long loops through the acclaiming pilgrims. They have been partying there for hours, installing campsites for the night while raw trucks and water cannons stole them to cool them from the temperatures of 85F.

“It is something spiritual, that you can only live every 25 years,” said Francisco Michel, a pilgrim from Mexico. “As a youngster, having the chance to live this meeting with the Pope, I think it is spiritual growth.”

During last week, these groups of young Catholics around the world spilled in Rome for their special jubilee celebration, during a holy year during which 32 million people should go down to the Vatican to participate in a secular pilgrimage to the headquarters of Catholicism.

The young people crossed the string streets in color coordinated t-shirts, praying to the rosary and the singing hymns with guitars, bongo drums and sparkling drums alongside. Using their flags as tarpaulins to protect them from the sun, they have taken over whole piazzas for Christian rock concerts and inspiring discussions, and held for hours at Circus Maximus to confess their sins to 1000 priests offering the sacrament in a dozen different languages.

The first American pope in history presided over the day before Saturday evening. He then returned to the Vatican for the night and returned for another Potemobile game and mass Sunday morning.

A mini day of world youth, 25 years later

Everything has the atmosphere of a World Youth Day, the Catholic Wood Festival that St. John Paul II inaugurated and made famous in Rome in 2000 in the same Tor Vergata field. Then, before about 2 million people, John Paul told young pilgrims that they were the “Sentinels of the morning” at the dawn of the third millennium.

The officials initially expected 500,000 young people this weekend, but Leo suggested that the number could reach 1 million.

“It’s a bit spoiled, but that’s what is good in 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 Beatitudes community, a charismatic group based in France.

She said, for example, that it had taken two hours to dine in a KFC exceeded by orders on Friday evening. The salt school that offered its group accommodation is an hour’s drive by bus. But Jobbour, like many in Rome this week, did not care about discomfort: all of this is part of the experience.

“I do not expect it to be better than that. I expected this in this way,” she said, while members of her group gathered on the church steps near the Vatican to sing and pray on Saturday morning before going to Tor Vergata.

There was a tragedy before the start of the vigil. The Vatican confirmed that an 18 -year -old Egyptian woman, identified as Pascale Rafic, died during the pilgrimage, apparently a cardiac arrest. Leo met his group on Saturday and exercised his condolences to his family.

The Romans have embarrassed, but tolerant

The Romans who did not fled the assault were embarrassed by the additional pressure on the notoriously insufficient public transport system of the city. Residents share publications on social networks explosions by Romans in children flooding metro platforms and overcrowding bus stops, which have delayed and complicated their trips to work.

But other Romans praised the enthusiasm that the young people brought. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni offered a video reception, amazing by the “Extraordinary Festival of Faith, Joy and Hope” that young people had created.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said hairdresser Rome Rina Verdone, who lives near the Tor Vergata field and woke up on Saturday to find a herd of police outside her house as part of the massive operation of 4,000 people shown to maintain peace. “You think that faith, religion is in difficulty, but it is proof that this is not the case.”

Verdone had already planned to resume another route at home on Saturday afternoon, which would require an additional half-mile walk, because it feared that “the invasion” of the children in her neighborhood would disturb her usual bus route. But she said she was more than happy to sacrifice.

“You consider the invasion as something negative. But it is a positive invasion,” she said.