The year was 1984. A jubilee year. Pope John Paul II invited young Catholic faithful from all over the world to join him at St. Peter’s Square on Palm Sunday. The celebration: God’s merciful love in this holy year of redemption, observed every 25 years by the worldwide Catholic community. The number that accepted the pope’s invitation was staggering. 300,000 young people convened with single-minded purpose. Never before had so many young people gathered in such vast numbers.
The following year, the pope called youth to Rome again. This time to celebrate the United Nations' International Youth Year. And again, the numbers grew. With that, the saint-pope’s dream of planning an epic event for the world’s young Catholics was born.
The first such event took place outside of Rome, four years later, in Santiago de Compostela. On this “Inside the Vatican” deep dive about the World Youth Day experience, I speak with Aura Miguel, who still remembers the festive mood when she attended her first World Youth Day in that Spanish city. She describes it as a “double experience,” embracing her identity then as a young Catholic and as a journalist covering the new youth festival for her radio station. “It was very fascinating for me.”
Almost four decades later, Aura, now a seasoned Vatican journalist, works for Rádio Renascença, a commercial church-owned radio station in Portugal. She has undertaken an impressive 106 papal trips across three papacies. It was an in-flight conversation with Pope Francis en route to World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro that inspired her to write her latest book. In Um Longo Caminho Até Lisboa (A Long Road to Lisbon), Aura compiles all her reporting notes from the 13 occasions she covered World Youth Day over nearly four decades.
When asked what her most enduring experience of World Youth Day over her career is, she eschews the question: "I cannot answer because every World Youth Day is different." She goes on to describe many moving experiences, but one moment that “impressed me a lot” was World Youth Day in Rome in the year 2000—a blisteringly hot summer event that attracted almost 1.5 million people.
Pope Francis arrives in Lisbon on Aug. 3. Hundreds of thousands of young people are expected to be there to greet him.
“The presence of young people was so big that there was no capacity in the city of Rome to join all the young people who were there for the welcoming ceremony,” Aura says. “The thing that touched me a lot was that everybody was crying. John Paul II was a star. In St. Peter’s Square as soon as he got the microphone he said: ‘Who are you looking for?’ and they shouted, ‘John Paul II,’ and he said: ‘No, no, no… It’s not him. It’s Christ you’re looking for.’”
Aura appears to have particular affection for Pope John Paul II, perhaps because he is the pope she got to know best in her years of traveling with popes. She describes him as “the most free man.” Turning briefly to the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI and his interactions with young people at World Youth Day, Aura recognizes that though his “style is completely different” and “he has a more rational way to speak about faith,” he nonetheless grew in his ability to draw crowds. This was notable among the thousands of young people that chanted “Benedetto, Benedetto” in the streets of Sydney as the German pope arrived at the first Australian Youth Day in 2008. For Benedict, “it was the first big experience of crowds of young people. One could consider it like a rock concert,” Aura says, laughing. “It was not at all the style of Ratzinger, so it was quite funny.”
But it is the style of the current papacy. “The style of Pope Francis is really… is a four-wheel-drive pontificate,” Aura says. “This style is very close to everybody; mainly in the way he expresses himself because his language is truly practical.” She especially notes the present pope’s insistence on in-person encounters. “He begs, ‘Get out from your home.’ ‘Get up from the sofa.’ ‘Don’t stay by the veranda to see what happens outside.—Go—go down and meet people.’”
Aura’s story is one of the three pilgrim’s stories told on the latest Inside the Vatican Deep Dive.
On this episode, you will also hear the story of Chris Radziminski, a Canadian engineer and policymaker, who lived with Pope John Paul II at World Youth Day in Rome. “It was very strange how everything unfolded—or, one might say, even providential,” he says. “One morning, they told us that we would be having lunch with Pope John Paul II.” Meeting John Paul II was a watershed moment in Chris’ life, and he already knew then that he would be on the team that would be responsible for planning the next World Youth Day in Toronto.
World Youth Day is about believing that the experience will make a difference in the lives of young people and on their relationship with God. John Paul II believed it. Benedict XVI believed it. And Francis believes it still.
He didn’t know it then but two years later he would be responsible for all the logistics of this mega-event. A young inexperienced graduate then, Chris “relied on some of the people that worked with us heavily,” he says, “They were everything from grizzled rock ’n’ roll types, who had toured with some of the largest bands, to people who were local producers of movies.”
While Chris’ distinct World Youth Day experiences as pilgrim in Rome and organizer in Toronto were momentous faith-filled occasions in his life, World Youth Day “wasn't a one-time event where a switch was flipped and, and I'm done,” he says. “It's been a continual growth, and I've been on that path ever since.”
Jane Sloan Peters first attended World Youth Day with her father. Today, she has two children of her own and is a professor of religious studies at the College of Mount St. Vincent. She also wrote an article for America last year where she explains the link between the famous Marian apparition to three children at Fatima, Portugal, over 100 years ago, and today's ever-intensifying war between Russia and Ukraine.
“The pope wants to place Ukraine and Russia in Mary’s hands,” Jane says of the pope’s decision last year to consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the intercession of Our Lady of Fátima. “He is doing this from a long tradition of popes praying for peace and invoking our Lady of Fátima in prayers for Russia and the world.” Pope Francis was last at the shrine in 2017 for the centennial celebrations of the Virgin Mother’s apparitions. He is expected to pray there again on Saturday, Aug. 5, a day before he presides at the closing Mass at World Youth Day in Portugal.
“One of the things I really liked that Pope Francis said about the consecration of Ukraine and Russia to our Lady of Fatima is that it's not a magical formula, but it's a spiritual act,” Jane says. “It’s an act of trust on the part of children who, in the midst of a cruel and senseless war, turn to their mother like a small child turns to their mother when he or she is afraid.”
As I told Jane on the podcast, I think her experience as a young mother is “very much the experience of World Youth Day….These young people, on the cusp of life, maybe afraid about what the future holds, looking at the world around them, a broken world, but also filled with hope for the possibility of what might be. And so I think it’s a perfect image in many ways…for what World Youth Day should be for us all.”
Pope Francis arrives in Lisbon on Aug. 3. Hundreds of thousands of young people are expected to be there to greet him. The impact the event will have on pilgrims is still to be determined. But World Youth Day is about believing that the experience will make a difference in the lives of young people and on their relationship with God. John Paul II believed it. Benedict XVI believed it. And Francis believes it still.
Correction: A previous version of this piece incorrectly stated that Pope Francis would visit Fátima on Sept. 5. The visit is planned for Aug. 5.
