Rome (Italy). As thousands of young people from around the world are already on their way to attend the major youth event taking place August 1-6 in Lisbon, Portugal, “For World Youth Day” could be the only prayer intention for the month of August 2023 that the Holy Father entrusts to the Catholic Church through the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network.
Some of the most emotional moments experienced by the Pope in previous editions of WYD scroll along the video, interspersed with questions from some young people from different continents, to which the Pope responds with openness and spontaneity:
When I go to church in my neighborhood, I only see old people. Is the Church now something for the elderly? The Church is not a senior club, just as it is not a youth club. If it becomes a senior club, it’s bound to die. St. John Paul II said that if you live with young people, you too become young, and the Church needs young people in order not to grow old.
Dear Pope Francis, why did you choose “Mary arose and went quickly” as the motto for this WYD? Because Mary, as soon as she knows that she will be the mother of God, doesn’t stand there to take a selfie or show off. The first thing she does is set out, in a hurry, to serve, to help. You too must learn from her how to set out to help others.
What do you expect from this WYD in Lisbon? I would like to see in Lisbon a seed of the world of the future. A world where love is at the center, where we can feel like brothers and sisters. We are at war; we need something else. A world that is not afraid to bear witness to the Gospel. A world in which there is joy, because if we Christians do not have joy, we are not credible and no one believes us.
“Let us pray that the World Youth Day in Lisbon will help us young people to get on the road, bearing witness to the Gospel with our lives” is the intention expressed by the young people themselves, who already with their joyful and multicultural presence are witnesses of hope for the world.
