‘Spiritual Breath of Fresh Air’

In a summer filled with violence and terrorism, the story of the more than a million people who traveled to Krakow, Poland, for the World Youth Day celebration with Pope Francis is a heartwarming contrast.

Teenagers and young adults came from countries all over the planet to see and hear, to pray with and cheer for a pope who “speaks their language.” A pope who instructed them to embrace the challenges of a Christian life and not to become couch potatoes, and who urged them to take risks, even small ones like holding out a hand in friendship, because “one who never risks never wins.”

With all of the singing, the dancing in the streets, the youthful exuberance on display in the historic Polish city, however, not even a casual observer would have mistaken the scene for a carnival.

Not when other scenes included thousands of young people standing in line for confession in a park, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament and joining the pope for a Way of the Cross procession.

They were young people proud to be Catholic and happy to be together celebrating that reality—standing shoulder to shoulder, at one point, holding candles at a nighttime vigil with the pope in a Europe that’s been shaken in recent months by a string of terror attacks.

All in all, the weeklong event was an uplifting interval in a troubled season.

Even Pope Francis acknowledged the hopefulness that greeted his arrival at the July 30 prayer vigil, with a call on the youths to model for adults the paths of mercy and respect.

“We adults need you to teach us,” he said, “like you are doing now, how to live with diversity, in dialogue, to experience multiculturalism not as a threat but as an opportunity.”

He instructed his eager listeners that Christians are called to watch what they say and what they post online. “We do not want to destroy, we do not want to insult anyone,” he said.

“We have no desire to conquer hatred with more hatred, violence with more violence, terror with more terror.”

Still, the evils and sufferings of the world were not far away during the pope’s time in Poland—the first visit to that country by the Argentine-born pontiff.

His July 29 visit to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which he spent in silent prayer, was followed by a visit to a hospital for seriously ill children and then the Way of the Cross—a ritual he described as “the only thing that conquers sin, evil and death, for it leads to the radiant light of Christ’s resurrection and opens the horizons of a new and fuller life.”

Clearly, those horizons of a fuller life inspired the pope—at the festival’s closing Mass—to speak of the “spiritual breath of fresh air” that the youths brought with them to Krakow. He appealed to them to bring that spirit back to their countries and communities and “wherever God’s providence leads you.”

We certainly would welcome that spirit here in New York, and we think the rest of the country and the world could use it too.