“A grandiose event”: a human tide swept through Lisbon on Saturday for the vigil of World Youth Day (WYD) chaired by Pope Francis, where up to a million people are expected.
Bags on their backs, equipped with their sleeping bags, hundreds of thousands of young Catholics from all over the world converged all afternoon under a blazing sun towards this immense esplanade set up for the occasion at the edge of the mouth Tagus, where they will spend the night.
Jorge Bergoglio, 86, is expected at 7:15 p.m. GMT for this giant festival-like prayer vigil which began with songs with a pop-rock tone sung by hundreds of choristers and musicians on the colossal altar which dominates the site of this old landfill.
The organizers are expecting up to a million people for this evening and the final mass on Sunday morning, the culmination of a week of festive, cultural and spiritual events which constitutes the largest international Catholic gathering.
Amid tents, flags from many countries and temporary sanitary facilities, the young pilgrims started dancing in a festive atmosphere, surrounded by heavy security.
“We came on foot from Barcelona, we left 40 days ago… It’s a pilgrimage to see the pope,” Santi Salvador, a 19-year-old Spanish student in audiovisual communication, told AFP. traveled 1,300 km.
Tiago Carlos, a 30-year-old Portuguese, wanted to participate because “it is a great event, for what it means for us Catholics with people from different cultures”.
On Saturday morning, 200,000 faithful had already gathered at the Fatima shrine in central Portugal, where the pope made a two-hour whirlwind visit to recite the rosary with young sick and disabled people.
Contrary to what was planned, François improvised almost all of his first speech, without reading his text, and did not deliver the second. He did not mention the main theme expected for this stage, the war in Ukraine and the search for peace, which he had already spoken about on Wednesday.
The pope had already improvised his speech on Friday. The Vatican spokesman explained to AFP that this change was due to a “discomfort of vision” due to a reflection on his glasses, but that, on Saturday, it had been “a choice” of the sovereign pontiff .
At Fatima, the spiritual leader of the 1.3 billion Catholics reaffirmed his message in favor of a Church open “to all, without exception”. “The Church has no doors, for all to enter,” he said.
Aboard his “Papamobile”, then seated in a wheelchair, Jorge Bergoglio enjoyed a long walkabout on the esplanade surrounding the small chapel marking the place where, according to Catholic tradition, the Virgin Mary appeared to three children in 1917.
Blessing and kissing many infants, the pope appeared smiling and blessed the faithful massed along the barriers.
A few minutes earlier, the sovereign pontiff had flown over the vast esplanade of the sanctuary aboard a helicopter, in a sky reddened and obscured by smoke and ash caused by a forest fire a hundred kilometers away.
He had already gone there in 2017 to canonize two of the shepherds there on the occasion of the centenary of the “apparitions”.
Since the beginning of his visit, the longest of a pope in this Iberian country, he has already addressed many topics, such as ecology, social networks, the war in Ukraine, or child crime within the Church. .
On Thursday and Friday, up to 800,000 faithful flooded the streets of Lisbon before massing in a park overlooking the city center to offer him a rock-star welcome, according to figures from the authorities.
05/08/2023 20:54:13 – Lisbon (AFP) – © 2023 AFP