Pope Francis has arrived in Lisbon for World Youth Day, which is expected to draw a crowd of one million pilgrims making it one the largest gatherings in Portugal’s history.
The man who has been overseeing the event is Bishop Américo Aguiar, the 49-year-old auxiliary in Lisbon who has sought to shape it into something not just for young Catholics but to inspire everyone who attends, regardless of their faith. Organisers have said this World Youth Day will have the largest number of different nationalities attending.
Aguiar was one of the the surprise appointments among the Pope’s latest batch of cardinals, and will become one of the youngest members of the College of Cardinals when he receives his red hat on 30 September.
He is one to watch, and given his nomination as a cardinal it’s unlikely that he will remain an auxiliary bishop for long.
Aguiar has shown himself to be a talented leader and organiser. Before ordination, he worked in local politics in the Porto region and was a member of the Socialist Party. As a priest and bishop, he has had numerous pastoral roles, has been closely involved in communications and has led the Lisbon patriarchate’s safeguarding commission.
Organising a World Youth Day is a huge logistical challenge and reportedly he has been drinking 20 cups of coffee a day. Pope Francis could have plans to appoint him to a Rome-based position.
Unsurprisingly, the cardinal-designate has found himself in the firing line. Soon after the news that the Pope had nominated Aguiar as a cardinal, Catholic outlets critical of Francis gleefully highlighted some of his comments about World Youth Day in an interview he had given to the Portuguese state-owned broadcaster.
He said that the message “of this encounter with the living Christ that the Pope wants to bring to young people” is a sense of “universal fraternity” that sees differences as enriching, adding: “We don’t want to convert young people to Christ, or the Catholic Church.”
Aguiar admitted that this remark “could have caused some perplexity”, but inter-religious dialogue – in which conversion is never the aim – is a focus of the event.
As Pedro Gabriel pointed out in an article for Where Peter Is, it was Pope Benedict XVI who said in 2012 that “dialogue does not aim at conversion, but at understanding”.
World Youth Day, which John Paul II began in 1984, has always been an invitation to all young people from across the world, rather than simply to Catholics, and Cardinal-designate Aguiar has insisted on this point.
This year it occurs against a backdrop of war and political uncertainty in Europe, and there have been plans to bring together young Ukrainians and Russians at some point during the gathering.
It is taking Francis’ message of his encyclical for a better politics, Fratelli Tutti, as its guide and is following the Pope’s insistence that the most effective evangelisation is through personal witness, and for the Church to be outward-facing.
It also takes place within the ongoing synod process. Speaking at World Youth Day, Sister Nathalie Becquart, the under-secretary of the synod office in Rome, said that young people are seeking a “welcoming, open, fraternal Church as the body of Christ, and they dream of a Church that will help to change the world”. World Youth Day is synodality in action.
Sr Nathalie was involved in the 2018 synod on youth, which saw an unprecedented involvement of young people. A running theme of the synod process has been a focus on engaging younger generations with one of the questions for discernment at the October synod meeting: “How can a ‘preferential option for young people’ be at the centre of our pastoral strategies and synodal life?”
Like Francis, Cardinal-designate Aguiar is seeking to translate the Christian message for the contemporary era, even if it means getting into a few scrapes along the way. This is a World Youth Day with a difference.
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