Pope Leo XIV attended an open-air youth prayer event outside Rome, marking the culmination of the week-long Jubilee of Youth, a key event in the Catholic church’s holy year. Over 800,000 young pilgrims from 146 countries assembled as part of a Jubilee of Youth, with some as many as 1 million attendees. The event began on Monday and comes nearly three months after the start of Leo’s papacy, and 25 years after the last such massive youth gathering in Rome under Poland’s pope, John Paul II.
Organizers said that people had continued to arrive during the vigil, and it was possible that attendance numbers had reached 1 million. Most pilgrims said they would camp overnight for a Sunday morning mass at the site led by Leo, marking the culmination of the week-long youth pilgrimage. The event was called a Catholic “Woodstock” as nearly two dozen musical and dance groups, many of them religious, entertained the crowds.
The Jubilee of Youth unfolds as under-30s navigate economic uncertainty, the climate crisis, and international conflict, with some pilgrims traveling from war-torn areas such as Syria and Ukraine. Security at the venue was tight, with at least 4,300 volunteers and more than 1,000 police watching over the vigil.
