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“Never leave us without your good way of ‘making a mess,’” Pope Francis encourages in a letter sent to young people on March 25, 2024. He offers youth a message of hope, five years after the publication of his apostolic exhortation Christus vivit (March 25, 2019), the fruit of the “Synod on Youth and Vocational Discernment” that took place in October 2018.
That year, almost 300 young people were brought together in Rome by the Pope for a “pre-synod” in March, before 267 synod fathers met for almost a month for the Synod. Drawing on the conclusions of this assembly, the Pope published his apostolic exhortation Christus vivit five months later.
In his anniversary letter, the Pontiff affirms his desire to see hope “renewed” in young people marked by anguish, suffering, and conflict. To make these difficulties “less burdensome,” he invites them to share their troubles with Jesus.
“Christ is alive and he loves you with an infinite love,” the Pontiff tells each young person. He assures them that God doesn’t expect young people to be “perfect,” but wants us to walk with him as “friends.”
It is in the light of this friendly relationship that the Pope asks young people to seek in the light of Christ the freedom they need to carry forward their roots to become “leaders of tomorrow” and “‘artisans’ of the future.”
He stresses the importance of young people’s “creativity” in the ongoing Synod on the future of the Church, to “explore new paths.” It was the 2018 Synod on Youth, he emphasizes, that “reawakened” synodality and discovered it as a “constitutive element of the Church.”
“Make your voices heard,” the Pontiff exhorts, echoing the words he spoke in 2013 at the World Youth Day (WYD) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
He mentions that WYD will celebrate its 40th anniversary on April 14. He renews the exhortation made to young people by John Paul II in 1984, when the Polish pope asked them to joyfully carry the message of salvation and redemption of the Risen Christ.
And today we celebrate...