What leaves the Jubilee of young people to the Church, faith, Italy, in the world? What left the previous Jubilee, a magnificent event around a magnificent pope, whose followers were called the Pope Boys. Before answering the question, I would like to say two things about the event, indeed I would like to express two joys. The first is the joy of a positive event worldwide, as few are now seen, moved by aspiration to save the world, but not only in the sign of the planet and the environment, but of the world inhabited by men at the center of creation, and therefore nature. Try to ask you the inverse question: how many events like this that light hope, they arouse confidence, in which the good is seen anyway. Rare, rarer in the West. To put it in summary: this is finally an event against anyone, only in favor of humanity and every person. “Do you think little, tell you, does it seem little?” Franco Califano would have said.
The second joy was seeing, feeling, those guys. Many said it, and it doesn’t make much sense to repeat it. But after decades of praise of the worst youth, you finally see something that evokes the best youth. Of course the best young people were not only here, fortunately or thanking God, they are scattered elsewhere, but there are. But seeing them here, together, together, united by a desire for faith, by a will of great things, to put it with Pope Leo XIV, is an incalculable good. For too long, the show has been inverse: you rarely see young to parade together and when it happens most of the time they are angry masses, screams, carnival, stained by slogans and life models. And you console you saying that not everyone is like this, there are others who, on their own, study, study, work, love, behave differently. With the Jubilee of young people you see for the first time after some time a crowd of young people and not only individuals who do not want to become the prostheses of their smartphones, who do not live in the usual jargon and the four prefabricated shinged that make them repeat.
There was even an epidermal level, a distinctive sign that I like to underline: those young people from Rome were not tattooed, still have respect for the body as it is given, with all its limits. For heaven’s sake, I am not saying that the tattooed are evil and the not tattooed the good, there are a thousand reasons to do it, there is a way and way to tattoo, some with a small symbolic sign and those who instead become the billboard of a script or a documentary on the environment. A person from the skin is never judged, and this applies not only for the color of the skin that you have received by fate but also from the decision to illustrate, fresco, your skin like a mural, a mythical story or other. However, having said that, the idea of recreating one’s identity with a permanent disguise of his own skin and vice versa the intention of leaving as God made you, as Mamma did you, as a nature made you, it is a small choice of life. With all the distinctions and without ever generalizing on such a little, I prefer the free -skinned guys, remained what they are, real, genuine, true, albeit at the first stage of truth.
But we leave the small question of tattoos, to say that yes, it was a beautiful youth. And there is no need to be believers, Christians, Catholics to say it; When a boy does not have the cult of himself, he does not live only by mirroring himself in the smartphone and his tributaries, when he protrudes, he exposes himself, believes in something higher than him, seeks the meeting and the community, already expresses a positive sense. While I saw them, I felt on the streets of a Sardinian country singing a girl who celebrated the self -centered anthem of youth. He repeated: I am crazy about me, and all the song was a do without others, given up of loves, but feeling good with themselves, self -regulating and self -defeated and so on. What an empty, sad, senseless life are building these guys who see, feel, they only think of themselves. The jubilation boys of Rome, on the other hand, no, or at least try not to reduce their world to this.
In short, the two joys that aroused those jubilations are true and far from secondary. And I add that with Pope Leo XIV you can breathe another air, you feel that God’s love prevails over the socio-planning message, and you like it that he is there and not his predecessor (peace to his soul). Around he felt more woytila than bergoglio …
But then I go back to the initial question and the experience of the previous Jubilee of young people and I realize that in the end I talked not of a world, of a people but of an event, that is, something that happens exceptionally, rarely. Yes, it is probably the spy of a way of being and living, it is not just a party, a special interruption of their daily life. But it remains that then the desolation, the desert, resumes the upper hand. We saw him over the period of these twenty -five years, which are then the first quarter of the third millennium. That image, those figures of hope, have been submerged by other images, quite other flows, other trends.
The events do not leave traces, even if they can be the light of different private life paths; But minority, unfortunately, and little capable of being an example and teaching for others. After the party, the saint caged, said a popular proverb, and that’s what he warned in the infinite Monday of life, after those short Sunday brackets. Difficult to build, difficult to find that spirit in everyday life. Yes, episodes are not lacking. For example, and only to stay in the line of the Jubilee of young people, soon there will be the Meeting of Communion and Liberation in Rimini, which has been a thread of that continuity that unfolds over days for decades. And there are small oasis of comfort and hope in an ocean of indifference, of impatience, with vast peninsulas of hatred and violence. The rest, I realize, goes in another direction; The prevailing tendency of the world, of Italy, of the West, goes in another direction, lives in another way: it has desires, not hopes, has calculations, not ideal. And he lives of the day, he is no longer waiting for, higher expectations. In short, it leaves little, the jubilee of young people. But that little is better than nothing, it is at least a small sign. I don’t say let’s be satisfied with that little; I say that from that little you have to leave.
