Be pilgrims, not tourists in life, pope tells young people

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — To fully experience love and hope, young people must approach the journey of life as pilgrims and not just sightseers seeking the perfect selfie, Pope Francis said.

“Do not be like superficial sightseers, blind to the beauty around you, never discovering the meaning of the roads you take, interested only in a few fleeting moments to capture in a selfie. Tourists do this,” the pope said in a message to young people ahead of the local celebrations of World Youth Day Nov. 24.

“Pilgrims, on the other hand, immerse themselves fully in the places they encounter, listen to the message they communicate and make them a part of their quest for happiness and fulfillment,” the pope wrote in the message release by the Vatican Sept. 17.

The November celebrations of World Youth Day are taking place just a month before Pope Francis is scheduled to open the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica and inaugurate the Holy Year 2025.

“The jubilee pilgrimage,” he told young people, “is meant to be the outward sign of an inward journey that all of us are called to make toward our final destination.”

While expressing his hope that many young people would be able to make a pilgrimage to Rome during the Holy Year, including the July 28-Aug. 3 celebration of the Jubilee of Youth, the pope said he hoped the year would be an opportunity for all Catholics to have “a moment of genuine, personal encounter with the Lord Jesus, the ‘Door’ of our salvation.”

Three attitudes should characterize Catholics’ celebration of the Holy Year, he said.

“First, thanksgiving, with hearts open to praise God for his many gifts, especially the gift of life. Then, a spirit of seeking, as an expression of our heart’s unquenchable thirst to encounter the Lord,” he said. “And finally, penance, which helps us to look within, to acknowledge the wrong paths and decisions we have at times taken and, in this way, to be converted to the Lord and to the light of his Gospel.”

Bernini’s colonnade around St. Peter’s Square is meant to evoke an image of the church as a mother embracing all her children, the pope said. “In this coming Holy Year of Hope, I invite all of you to experience the embrace of our merciful God, to experience his pardon and the forgiveness of all our ‘interior debts,’ as in the biblical tradition of the jubilee years.”

Knowing that one is loved and forgiven by God makes it possible to embrace others and help them sense the welcome and love of God, he said.

Pope Francis told the young people that he realizes how challenging it can be to look to the future with hope, especially “in times marked by dramatic situations that generate despair and prevent us from looking to the future with serenity: the tragedy of war, social injustices, inequalities, hunger and the exploitation of human beings and the natural environment.”

Too many young people, he said, are “tempted to live without hope, as prisoners of boredom (or) depression” or destructive behaviors.

The key to overcoming those temptations, the pope said, is to trust in the Lord and keep turning to him when the road gets rocky.

Getting tired is a normal part of any long journey, he said. But that is different from “ennui, the apathy and dissatisfaction that affect those who never set out, choose, decide, take risks, preferring to remain in their own comfort zone, closed in on themselves, seeing and judging the world from a distance, without ever ‘dirtying their hands’ with problems, with other people, with life itself.”

Ennui is “a kind of wet cement in which we stand; eventually it hardens, weighs us down, paralyzes us and prevents us from moving forward,” Pope Francis wrote. “I prefer the tiredness of those who are moving forward, not the ennui of those who stand still with no desire to move.”

The energy and nourishment to keep going, he said, are provided by Jesus in the Eucharist.

Pope Francis cited the example of Blessed Carlo Acutis, the Italian teenager set to be canonized soon, who “made the Eucharist his most important daily appointment!”

All Catholics should do the same, the pope said, “In this way, in union with the Lord, we can walk without tiring, for he is walking alongside us. I encourage all of you to rediscover the great gift of the Eucharist!”