RIMINI, Emilia Romagna — Pope Leo XIV told young people gathered to meet him at the Rimini Meeting this weekend that they are a sign the future is promising and not a threat. He is the first pope to attend the annual Catholic festival since John Paul II went in 1982.
“The world needs you, your charity, your faithfulness,” he said, before a crowd organisers put at 60,000 inside the fairground.
Young volunteers sang and chanted at the big screens. When he appeared there was a roar, then silence across the pavilions once he took the microphone. His argument to them turned on freedom rather than obedience.
“Truth is met only in freedom,” he said, warning that there is no love in coercion, indoctrination, or manipulation.
He asked them to widen their friendships beyond narrow belonging and to treat their movement as a springboard into the whole of reality rather than a shelter from it. The Church, he said, grows by attraction and not by proselytism.
“It’s particularly significant for young Italians who are increasingly detached from inherited religious practice,” Ty Armstrong Sr, founder of SloppBoxx Video Entertainment, told Italy Now. “Presenting faith as a free encounter with truth, rather than simply an identity one belongs to, speaks to a generation that wants to choose what it believes rather than simply inherit it.”
He reached back to John Paul II when he added that if the world needs anything today it is communion, saying that communion begins with the young.
Off the text
Leo XIV arrived by helicopter at 2.45 p.m. after a morning in San Marino and lunch with Augustinian nuns at Pennabilli, Emilia-Romagna. He walked the halls, stopped at an exhibition on Saint Augustine, and met families at the Villaggio Ragazzi, the Meeting’s area for children.
Then he put the prepared text aside. The loudest applause, he told the hall, belonged to Jesus Christ. “If we want to change the world, Saint Augustine said, we must change ourselves, and our heart must never be closed.”
The 47th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples runs to August 26 in Rimini, Emilia-Romagna. Founded in 1980 and organised by the Catholic movement Comunione e Liberazione (Communion and Liberation), it draws hundreds of speakers from politics, business, and the Church. Organisers recorded 800,000 attendances last year and list about 500 speakers across more than 150 sessions this week. The title comes from the closing line of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Leo later met sick and disabled people at the cathedral before Mass at the port, where Il Resto del Carlino reported 40,000 people. John Paul II celebrated on the same shoreline 44 years ago.
To the generation in front of him, the ask was not loyalty but the nerve to stay open.
