LISBON, Portugal (CNS) – Pope Francis asked the 1.5 million young people who attended World Youth Day to take “what God has sown into your hearts” back to their home countries and build a joyful church that is open to all.

Young pilgrims, including the 21 from the Diocese of Scranton who made the trip to Portugal, constantly reflected on the pope’s main point during the official welcome ceremony for World Youth Day Aug. 3: in the church there is room for “everyone, everyone, everyone.”

Pope Francis waves as he arrives to lead the Way of the Cross during World Youth Day at Eduardo VII Park in Lisbon, Portugal, Aug. 4, 2023. (OSV News photo/Bob Roller)

He asked the jubilant crowd of flag-waving young people to repeat the refrain with him in Lisbon’s Eduardo VII Park and shouts of “todos, todos, todos” – “everyone” in Spanish and Portuguese – spread throughout the crowd.

As he did often during the trip, the pope solicited engagement from the crowd, asking them to repeat after him or consider in silence a question he posed.

Yet was during his meeting Aug. 2 with Portuguese bishops, priests, religious and pastoral workers that the pope first issued his “todos” message.

“Please, let us not convert the church into a customs office” where only the “just,” “good,” and “properly married” can enter while leaving everyone else outside, he said. “No. The church is not that,” he said, rather it is a place for “righteous and sinners, good and bad, everyone, everyone, everyone.”

Asked during his inflight news conference Aug. 6 how the church can be for everyone when women and gay people are excluded from some sacraments, Pope Francis said that “the church is open to all, but then there is legislation that regulates life inside the church.”

“This does not mean that (the church) is closed. Each person encounters God by their own way, inside the church, and the church is mother and guides each one by their own path,” he responded.

At 86 years old, Pope Francis showed no sign of slowing down for the 42nd international trip of his pontificate, which he jokingly told journalists on the flight to Lisbon will “make me young again.”

The pope’s packed agenda had three to four official events per day, and he added private meetings with several groups and individuals at the Vatican nunciature in Lisbon where he was staying. Among them was a group of abuse survivors who met with the pope for over an hour Aug. 2, during which they “dialogued about this plague” of abuse, the pope said.

The pope celebrated Mass with 1.5 million young people sprawled across Lisbon’s riverside Tejo Park Aug. 6 and told them not to be afraid of pursuing their great dreams to change the world.

“Let’s all repeat this phrase in our hearts: ‘Don’t be afraid,’” Pope Francis told the crowd. “Jesus knows the hearts of each one of you, the successes and the failures, he knows your hearts. And today he tells you, here in Lisbon for this World Youth Day: ‘Don’t be afraid.’”

In addition to listening the testimonies of young people and fielding questions from some of them during public events, Pope Francis had a chance for more direct interactions with several young people during the trip. He heard the confessions of three pilgrims and ate lunch with a group of 10 young people Aug. 4.

The pope later shared that he spoke to one young man who had previously considered taking his own life and said youth suicide is a problem today, noting the challenge is especially prevalent in places where universities and the job market are very demanding.

After the closing Mass, the pope announced that Seoul, South Korea, would be the location for the next World Youth Day in 2027, drawing great applause from the South Korean delegations scattered throughout the crowd.

The previous morning, Pope Francis visited the Shrine of Our Lady of Fátima, where he again put aside his prepared remarks and spoke off the cuff, focusing on Mary and skipping over an expected prayer for peace in the world.

He later said that “I prayed to Our Lady, and I prayed for peace” before a statue of Our Lady of Fátima, but “I did not advertise.”

In the shrine’s Chapel of the Apparitions, marking the exact spot where the three Portuguese children claimed to see Mary in 1917, he said the open-air chapel “is like a beautiful image of the church, welcoming, without doors, so that all can enter.”

During the Aug. 6 press conference, Pope Francis also brushed off concerns about eyesight issues that arose after he joked that his glasses “aren’t working” at one of his events and continued to largely improvise his remarks for the rest of his trip. And he said his health and recovery from abdominal surgery in June is “going well.”

SCRANTON – In less than one week an expected 1.5 million young Catholics will descend on the capital city of Portugal for World Youth Day 2023. Among them will be 21 pilgrims from the Diocese of Scranton.

World Youth Day 2023 is scheduled to take place in Lisbon, Aug. 1-6, and the motto for this year’s event is a passage from Luke’s Gospel: “Mary arose and went with haste.”

Diocesan pilgrims who will be attending World Youth Day 2023 gathered for a retreat on June 11 at the Diocesan Pastoral Center in Scranton.

As a part of their trip, those young people and chaperones in the Diocese of Scranton delegation will also visit the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima.

“Our Diocesan delegation will visit the site of the apparitions and the miracle of Fatima. We’re also going to visit the Shrine of the Eucharistic Miracle of Santarem which is exciting and then we’re going to dive into the experiences of World Youth Day themselves,” Shannon Kowalski, Diocesan Director of Service and Mission, said.

Only six of the pilgrims from the Diocese of Scranton have attended World Youth Day before.

“It is certainly exciting for me because this will be my first time attending World Youth Day,” seminarian Jacob Mutchler said. “I’m very much interested and excited to visit Fatima. I think that it is going to be a very powerful experience. I think we can expect a very powerful experience having people from all parts of the world coming together to share their faith and worship the Lord and really grow in their relationship with Him.”

Maggie Guarnieri of Pittston, a parishioner of Saint Maria Goretti Parish in Laflin, will be traveling with her two sisters.

“The fact that we all get to do this together is going to bring us even closer than we already are so I’m really excited for that,” Guarnieri explained. “I’m very excited to be incredibly present along the way and almost unplug from reality and be fully immersed in this experience.”

Pope Francis is expected to have nine events with young people, including hearing their confessions and eating lunch with them. He will arrive in Lisbon Aug. 2 where he will be welcomed by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, president of Portugal and pray vespers with local bishops, priests, religious, seminarians and pastoral workers.

The highlight of the trip will come Aug. 6 when the pope will end his trip to Portugal by celebrating the closing Mass for World Youth Day along the Portuguese coast.

“I’m really excited to gather with so many young people from around the world and also just to see Pope Francis. I think he has such a calling for young people to get involved in the church,” Tommy Flynn, Director of Youth and Family Ministry at Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Joseph Marello Parishes in Pittston, stated.

Pope Francis has called World Youth Day an antidote against indifference, isolation and lethargy.

“This is a great opportunity for young people around the world to see that there are young people in the church and they’re not the church of the future but they’re the church of today,” Flynn added.

At 23, Flynn says he will be excited to take the energy and excitement he experiences and bring it back home.

“Even if we don’t experience Mass in the same language, it is still a Mass to everyone and we know the special things that happen during Mass,” Flynn said. “I’m just really excited to get to know some of the other pilgrims from across the diocese, across the world and deepen my faith a little bit.”

Kowalski, who has been planning the pilgrimage for several years, echoes those sentiments.

“There is just no other experience like it. There is no way you can go to World Youth Day and not come back a changed person. There are literally millions of people from all over the world – United States, Europe, Asia, Africa – all coming together for the same reason,” Kowalski explained. “They want to have an experience of faith rooted in the Catholic experience, to pray with our Holy Father, Pope Francis, to learn more about our faith and to take advantage of the Sacraments.”

Following their experiences at World Youth Day 2023, many of the Diocese of Scranton pilgrims will also visit Barcelona, Spain, to visit the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia before returning home to the United States.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – World Youth Day is an antidote against indifference, isolation and lethargy, Pope Francis said.

Since World Youth Days were established by St. John Paul II in 1985, “they have involved, moved, stirred and challenged generations of women and men,” he said in the preface of a new book, “A Long Journey to Lisbon,” by Aura Miguel, a Portuguese journalist for Rádio Renascença. Vatican News published the preface May 2.

The initial intuition that inspired St. John Paul “has not faded,” Pope Francis wrote, as today’s world, especially its young people, is facing enormous changes and challenges.

Pope Francis greets the crowd before celebrating Mass for World Youth Day pilgrims at St. John Paul II Field in Panama City, Panama, Jan. 27, 2019. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

Young people, he wrote, “risk self-isolation every day, living in a virtual environment much of their life, ending up as prey to an aggressive market that creates false needs.”

“Getting out of the house, heading out with fellow travelers, having important experiences of listening and prayer combined with moments of celebration, and doing it together, makes these moments precious for everybody’s life,” he wrote.

“We really need young people who are at the ready, eager to respond to God’s dream, to care about others, young people who discover the joy and beauty of a life spent for Christ in service to others, to the poorest, to the suffering,” the pope said.

Pope Francis repeated his call to young people not to live life “standing on a balcony watching life go by,” avoiding getting involved and getting their hands dirty, putting a screen between them and the rest of the world.

“Many times I have told (young people) not to be ‘couch potatoes,'” not to be “‘anesthetized’ by people who benefit from having them ‘dumb and numb,'” he wrote.

Being young is the time for dreaming, the pope wrote, and for being open to the real world, “discovering what is really worthwhile in life, struggling to conquer it; it is opening oneself to deep and true relationships, it is engaging with others and for others.”

But, he wrote, the world is facing so many challenges: the pandemic has shown that “we can only save ourselves together”; there is “the vortex of war and rearmament”; the arms race “seems unstoppable and threatens to lead us to self-destruction”; there is the war in Ukraine; and many wars and conflicts continue to be forgotten, “so much unspeakable violence continues to be perpetrated.”

How are young people to respond, the pope asked? “What are they being called to do with their energy, their vision of the future, their enthusiasm?”

“They are called to say, ‘We care.’ We care about what is happening in the world” and about “the fate of millions of people, of so many children, who have no water, no food, no medical care, while the rulers seem to be competing to see who can spend the most on the most sophisticated armaments,” he wrote. “We care about everything,” including all of creation and the digital world, “which we are challenged to change and make more and more humane.”

“World Youth Days have been an antidote to life on a balcony, to the anesthesia that makes people prefer the couch, to disinterest,” Pope Francis said in the preface.

“WYD is an event of grace that awakens, broadens horizons, strengthens the heart’s aspirations, helps people dream, to look ahead,” he wrote. “It is a planted seed that can bear good fruit.”

World Youth Day 2023 is scheduled to take place in Lisbon, Portugal, Aug. 1-6, and the motto for this year’s event is a passage from the Luke’s Gospel: “Mary arose and went with haste.”

In his formal message for WYD 2023, published in last year, Pope Francis said that the figure of Mary shows young people “the path of closeness and encounter” at a time when “our human family, already tested by the trauma of the pandemic, is racked by the tragedy of war.”