On the Feast of the Transfiguration, Aug. 6, Pope Leo XIV stood in Assisi before thousands of young Europeans gathered for the “Go! Franciscan Youth Meeting” and spoke with the clarity of a bell: “Not a world to defend, but to embrace.”
The distinction between those two verbs is close to absolute.
To defend presupposes a perimeter and, therefore, an enemy.
To embrace presupposes risk and, therefore, freedom.
Lately, we have become quite accomplished at the pretense of defending our society, our nation, our tribes.
Identity—national, cultural, even religious—has drifted back to being imagined as a trench: something one inherits and guards, rather than something to be tested by meeting what does not resemble it.
“Breaking free from the culture of power and tearing down the walls that separate human beings from one another,” the Pope told the crowd, “is never a betrayal of our families”—of one’s city, or one’s tradition.
It is, rather, freeing them “from enemies invented out of fear or ignorance.
The second move of the visit concerned time. A young man in the crowd admitted to fearing irreversible choices.
Leo XIV’s answer was blunt: “The courage to make a definitive choice may well be the most revolutionary act of all.”
For centuries, he said, the Church educated people to a sense of the provisional—everything passes, only God remains—within societies where one’s fate was largely already written.
Today, the opposite is true: “An often-confused understanding of freedom leads us to believe that nothing in life is ever truly decided,” and that illusion, he warned, “only increases our fears and makes it easier to lose our way.”
Experiences, contacts, and consumption multiply endlessly, while relationships slide into mutual use.
Eight hundred years ago, on that same plain, hundreds of friars gathered in silence.
The Pope quoted the old chronicle: “Here forty, there a hundred and there eighty together, all employed in speaking of God, in prayers, in tears and in exercises of charity, behaving themselves with so great silence… that no clamor was heard there.”
That silence, he said, “stands in stark contrast to war, with its violence, clamor and cruelty”—and it is exactly what a screen-bound age has lost the habit of: having real, non-artificial human beings close by.
The gathering’s title was an English imperative with the flavor of both the future and hope.
“The title of your gathering, Go!, is a mission,” Leo XIV said. “A sending forth onto paths for which we have no maps, because they are opened by listening to the heart.” Go—or, as the Pope himself put it, let’s go.
With thanks to Global Catholic and Antonio Spadaro SJ, where this article originally appeared.
