Pope Leo XIV thrills hundreds of thousands of young Catholics at Holy Year youth festival

Hundreds of thousands of young Catholics poured into a vast field on Rome’s outskirts Saturday for the weekend highlight of the Vatican’s 2025 Holy Year: an evening vigil, outdoor slumber party and morning Mass celebrated by Pope Leo XIV that marks his first big encounter with the next generation of Catholics.

Leo arrived by helicopter as the sun set over the Tor Vergata field and immediately boarded his open-topped popemobile for long loops through the flag-waving, cheering pilgrims. They had already been partying there for hours, setting up campsites for the night as misting trucks and water cannons spritzed them to cool them down from the 85F temperatures.

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

For the past week, these bands of young Catholics from around the world have poured into Rome for their special Jubilee celebration, in a Holy Year in which 32 million people are expected to descend on the Vatican to participate in a centuries-old pilgrimage to the seat of Catholicism.

The young people have been traipsing down cobblestoned streets in color-coordinated T-shirts, praying the Rosary and singing hymns with guitars, bongo drums and tambourines shimmying alongside. Using their flags as tarps to shield them from the sun, they have taken over entire piazzas for Christian rock concerts and inspirational talks, and stood for hours at the Circus Maximus to confess their sins to 1,000 priests offering the sacrament in a dozen different languages.

History’s first American pope was presiding over the vigil Saturday night. He was then returning to the Vatican for the night and coming back for another popemobile romp and Mass on Sunday morning.

A mini World Youth Day, 25 years later

It all has the vibe of a World Youth Day, the Catholic Woodstock festival that St. John Paul II inaugurated and made famous in Rome in 2000 at the very same Tor Vergata field. Then, before an estimated 2 million people, John Paul told the young pilgrims they were the “sentinels of the morning” at the dawn of the third millennium.

Officials had initially expected 500,000 youngsters this weekend, but Leo hinted the number might reach 1 million.

“It’s a bit messed up, but this is what is nice about 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 Community of the Beatitudes, a France-based charismatic group.

She said, for example, that it had taken two hours to get dinner at a KFC overwhelmed by orders on Friday night. The Salesian school that offered her group housing is an hour away by bus. But Jobbour, like many in Rome this week, didn’t mind the discomfort: It’s all part of the experience.

“I don’t expect it to be better than that. I expected it this way,” she said, as members of her group gathered on church steps near the Vatican to sing and pray Saturday morning before heading out to Tor Vergata.

There was one tragedy before the vigil began. The Vatican confirmed that an Egyptian 18-year-old woman, identified as Pascale Rafic, died during the pilgrimage, reportedly of cardiac arrest. Leo met on Saturday with her group and extended his condolences to her family.

Romans inconvenienced, but tolerant

Those Romans who didn’t flee the onslaught have been inconvenienced by the additional strain on the city’s notoriously insufficient public transport system. Residents are sharing social media posts of outbursts by Romans at kids flooding subway platforms and crowding bus stops, which have delayed and complicated their commutes to work.

But other Romans have welcomed the enthusiasm the youngsters have brought. Premier Giorgia Meloni offered a video welcome, marveling at the “extraordinary festival of faith, joy and hope” that the young people had created.

“I think it’s marvelous,” said Rome hairdresser Rina Verdone, who lives near the Tor Vergata field and woke up Saturday to find a gaggle of police outside her home as part of the massive, 4,000-strong operation mounted to keep the peace. “You think the faith, the religion, is in difficulty, but this is proof that it’s not so.”

Verdone had already made plans to take an alternate route home Saturday afternoon, which would require an extra half-mile walk, because she feared the “invasion” of kids in her neighborhood would disrupt her usual bus route. But she said she was more than happy to make the sacrifice.

“You think of invasion as something negative. But this is a positive invasion,” she said.