Young people pay the highest price for wars and injustices

In his message for World Youth Day, which the Church will celebrate in the dioceses on November 24, a few weeks before the beginning of the Jubilee, Pope Francis says: “The Lord also opens a path before you and invites you to follow it with hope.”

Vatican City () – Today it is often the young who pay “the highest price” for the wounds that the world is suffering. But to this generation called to live in a difficult time, the Church also wants to bring the Gospel’s message of hope, Pope Francis said in his address to the Vatican. Message for World Youth Day 2024, which was announced today by the Vatican Press Office.

The text – whose title is the biblical verse “Those who wait for the Lord will walk without growing weary” (Is 40:31) – prepares the meeting that this year will take place in the various dioceses on Sunday 24 November, the Solemnity of Christ the King. A meeting that falls a few weeks before the opening of the Holy Year 2025 – Christmas Eve – whose central theme is hope.

Pope Francis has this horizon in mind when he addresses young people in his message. Referring to the context of the verse taken from the book of the prophet Isaiah – when the exile of the people of Israel in Babylon ends – the pontiff observes that today too we live in “times marked by dramatic situations that generate despair and prevent us from looking to the future with serenity: the tragedy of war, social injustice, inequality, hunger, the exploitation of human beings and creation. Often – he explains – those who pay the highest price are you young people, who perceive the uncertainty of the future and do not see clear possibilities for your dreams, thus running the risk of living without hope, prisoners of boredom and sadness, sometimes dragged by the illusion of crime and destructive behavior. Therefore, dear young people, I would like that, as happened to Israel in Babylon, the message of hope reaches you too: today the Lord also opens a path before you and invites you to follow it with joy and hope.”

A journey that is not without its difficulties. The Pope speaks of the anxiety caused by the social pressures to which young people are subjected, of the temptation of boredom or of taking refuge in one’s own “comfort zone”, “seeing and judging the world from behind a screen, without ever getting one’s hands dirty with problems, with others, with life”. “I prefer the tiredness of those who are on the journey rather than the boredom of those who remain still and have no desire to walk!”

“If there is a great goal,” says Francis, “if life is not going in vain, if nothing of what I dream, plan and achieve is lost, then it is worth walking and sweating, enduring obstacles and facing fatigue, because the final reward is wonderful.” Times of crisis in themselves, the pontiff continues, “are not wasted or useless times, but can be very important opportunities for growth. They are moments of purification of hope.”

In his message, Pope Francis invites young people to rediscover “the great gift of the Eucharist” as a force that sustains them on this journey, citing the example of the young Italian Blessed Carlo Acutis, whose canonization is expected in the coming months. The Pontiff also hopes that many young people from all over the world will be able to go to Rome for the Jubilee or live the Holy Year in their own dioceses. “I urge you to live it with three fundamental attitudes,” he says: “thankfulness, so that your hearts may open to praise for the gifts you have received, above all for the gift of life; searching, so that the journey expresses the constant desire to seek the Lord and not to quench the thirst of the heart; and finally, repentance, which helps us to look within ourselves, to recognize the wrong steps and decisions we sometimes take, and thus be able to convert to the Lord and to the light of his Gospel.”

“In this coming Holy Year of Hope,” concludes Pope Francis, “I invite you all to experience the embrace of the merciful God, to experience his forgiveness, the remission of all our “internal debts,” as was the tradition in the biblical jubilees. And so, welcomed by God and reborn in Him, may you also become open arms for so many of your friends and contemporaries who need to feel, through your welcome, the love of God the Father. May each of you give “even a smile, a gesture of friendship, a fraternal glance, a sincere listening, a free service, knowing that, in the Spirit of Jesus, this can become a fruitful seed of hope,” and thus become tireless missionaries of joy.