Buenos Aires (AsiaNews) – Agustín, Agustina, Guadalupe, and Franco are 25, 29, 31, and 27 years old, young people who spoke last night in front of Pope Leo XIV during yesterday’s vigil at the Monumento de los Españoles in Buenos Aires.
This is the same site where, two days earlier, a huge crowd embraced him. Around a million young men and women attended this historic meeting, coming from the city’s outskirts as well as neighbouring countries. Choirs and songs from the “pope’s youth” filled the air of the Argentine capital.
Earlier, in Córdoba, Leo had encouraged young people to "make noise", echoing the famous words often used by the Argentine-born Pope Francis.
To Agustina, who asked him how to deal with the “frustration” and “limitations” experienced when reaching out to the most marginalised people, Leo said: “Do all that you can, put your whole heart into it and join your efforts to those of others.” He reminded her that, while human “strength” has its limits, “God’s strength never runs out.”
To Franco, who sought advice on how to “bring together” the love experienced in his parish and family with his “work responsibilities” and “everyday life,” the pontiff said that, “We must not live two separate lives. [. . .] bring your whole life to the altar each time you take part in the Eucharist.”
Today, in his address, the pontiff expressed gratitude for the “warm welcome” and shared his “joy” at being present, the final day of the Argentine leg of his apostolic journey to Latin America, set to leave by plane for Lima, Peru, this afternoon.
Leo mentioned the “sign” that opened the meeting: the lit candles held by young people. This “is the fire of his love, communicated through the Holy Spirit, which purifies our hearts and makes us capable of loving,” he said.
“Do not bow down before anything that cannot give you life”
Last night, Leo warned young people against “idols” that today “demand our worship”, like “success at any cost, money, an obsession with appearance, popularity or the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure.”
The pope mentioned betrayals and humiliations “on social media”, as well as “envy” and “selfishness”, warning against the merchants of “pleasures that ultimately enslave us, such as pornography and addictive substances.”
“You too are called to stand firm before the idols of our time. Do not bow down before anything that cannot give you life. And if you have ever fallen, get back up. Do not allow anything or anyone to take away the freedom God has given you.”
Pope Leo XIV revisited the well-known words spoken by Pope Francis at the 2023 World Youth Day in Lisbon: “Everyone, everyone, everyone!”
“To each of you I would like to say that there is a place for you in the Church, with your questions, your wounds and your story,” he said. “No one has fallen so low that Christ cannot raise them up.”
Indeed, “Allow Christ to transform you. Do not be afraid to approach the Sacrament of Reconciliation,” the pontiff said. “Share your bread with those who are hungry, open your doors to those who have no home, visit the sick and those whom no one wants to visit.”
Leo also called to care for “forms of suffering that cannot be seen”.
Mass in Córdoba and meeting with religious figures
Yesterday morning, Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass in Córdoba, Argentina’s second-largest city, on the grounds of the Military Aviation School, before a crowd of some 650,000 people.
In his homily he said that “everyone” is called to holiness, and “this calling is always missionary: we must make known to others the beauty that we have come to know in Christ”:
“We celebrate this Holy Mass for the sanctification of the people of Argentina, for the sanctification of all of you. Open your hearts, and with God’s grace, go forth and be holy: at school and in the town square, in family life and with friends, in the countryside and in the city, on the farm and in the office,” he said.
Also yesterday afternoon, the pontiff met with bishops, priests, deacons, religious men and women, seminarians, and pastoral workers at the Cathedral of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción in Córdoba. On this occasion he mentioned the paradox of “work[ing] hard for God yet spend[ing] less and less time with him.
“Let us therefore simply return to the Eucharist, to listening to the word and to that relationship with the Lord that sustains everything else,” Leo said. “Let us tend to the fire that once kindled our vocation and not allow the pressures of daily life, weariness or routine eventually to extinguish it.”
Visit to the Federal Penitentiary Complex of Buenos Aires
This morning, after leaving the Apostolic Nunciature, Pope Francis visited the Federal Penitentiary Complex of Buenos Aires, which was inaugurated in 1927 as a detention facility for minor offenders.
Under Argentina’s dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, the facility served as a secret torture centre, housing numerous political activists. A project is currently underway to close the site and replace it with a new complex in Marcos Paz.
Pope Leo was accompanied by the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Ignacio García Cuerva. He was welcomed by the prison director and other officials, followed by an introduction from the prison’s chaplain, Father Matías Martini.
The pope shared his thoughts with those present on the “experience of our limitations,” noting how “society” often portrays anything that constitutes a limitation as a “defect to be corrected.”
Instead, let us think, he said, about “the sense of omnipotence produced by drugs, the false power that comes from easy money, the cowardly sense of security that comes from inflicting violence upon the weakest, and the impunity that results from corruption.”
“We often become aware of our limitations through sin and its consequences.”
Addressing the inmates, Leo XIV said that “your present circumstances can become an opportunity to begin your lives anew”.
“Indeed, human beings do not flourish in spite of their limitations, but often through them,” he said.
The pontiff stressed that prisons make “the harsh reality of limitation painfully clear,” with the missed possibility “to leave freely, being unable to embrace your children each day and even having to endure other forms of deprivation.”
Prisons, he added, are places of “profound changes and conversions,” for “growth, learning and the acquisition of new skills and knowledge.”
In such a place, those who have “experienced human fragility in its most painful form” can “transform the desert of their own existence into a fruitful garden.”
After the visit to the prison, the pontiff led Mass on the square in front of the Basilica of Our Lady of Luján, which was followed by the farewell ceremony at Ministro Pistarini International Airport.
