"GOODBYE, SEE YOU IN ROME"

Angelo Scelzo

At the end of every World Youth Day there is a goodbye and an appointment. This time the coordinates for the place and date of the next meeting have already existed for a long time: Rome and the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. The youth pilgrimage thus converges quite naturally with the great pilgrimage of the whole universal Church towards the Holy Door of the new Millennium of Christ.

But young people are the leading group who show the way and set the pace. In the prayer of one vicar from the French diocese of Bayonne - recalled in one of Cardinal Etchegaray's homilies - there is almost the expression of a measure of their energy in relation to the faith.

«If you stop... they stop.

If you weaken... they give in.

If you sit down... they lie down.

If you doubt... they despair.

If you criticize... they pull to pieces.

If you go forward... they pass you.

If you give them your hand... they will give you their life.

And if you pray... then they will be saints!»

Prayer. This is the element that upsets every scheme, the factor which, as we look at the faces of the nation of young people in Paris, shows that something is wrong with the thousands of sociological analyses, surveys, polls and sampling of every kind. A reality that deserves to be mentioned is under everyone's nose: it had become almost boring to speak about young people, so open and obvious was the attempt to treat them as a market commodity to be known - certainly - deep down and in all their facets, to the point of building around them a whole world entirely their own. A world for which we "hold the keys", so, merely a space for sale, made up of windows and dazzling lights.

Who does not remember the ever recurring waves of a certain "juvenilism" whose only extenuating circumstance, in the eyes of young people, might have been the fact that it surely caused more harm among the generations of adults. The Pope's young people (in Rome, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Compostela, Czestochowa, Denver, Manila, Paris and every other square which allows the wind of hope to blow) have swept away the image and even the memory of these tricks and deceits.

Their faces are washed with the soap of water and hope, and that cloak of mediocrity that only just allows them to take fearful and laboured steps has not had time to insinuate itself into their eyes. And yet, life does not give any reductions even for them; indeed its price is becoming increasingly higher, at times to the point of becoming unbearable. Tragedies, fears, emptiness and anxieties do not take years into account before knocking roughly at the door. One is young but one is already a whole person.

When they follow the Pope who calls them they know they will not be listening to easy words. But they ask for true words. And it is then that they get up and go. They leave their tents and go onto the roads of humanity to become Christ's "letters" in the world. «Teacher, where are you staying?» «Come and see».