The Jubilee is a year of particular grace. While at the end of June I was accompanying a group of young people from Grenoble who were travelling to Rome, I asked myself: “We know with certainty that this jubilar grace is afforded to us, but can we touch it? Can it be seen? How will I recognize it?”.
Yes, it is possible. You can touch grace in the objectivity of the life of the Church which, like a mother, opens her Holy Doors. It happened when all of the French young people -around 21,000- went through the Holy Door of St. John Laterna. It was moving to observe them while they prayed the litanies of the saints, sang psalms, recited the Creed and prayers for the intentions of the Holy Father.
You can touch grace in the sacraments: how amazing to see the Circus Maximus transformed in a huge open-air confessional, where dozens of priests heard the confessions of young people, in every language, for an entire day!
You can touch grace through the saints. Rome was never so beautiful as in those days! At every corner there were open churches and the possibility of encountering many saints: the body of Piergiorgio Frassati, venerated in expectation of his canonization; the room of St. Mother Teresa, taken care of by the sisters in the house of Heaven; the relics of St. Therese, preserved at Trinità dei Monti; up to the martyrs of the 20th century, to whom is dedicated the church of St. Bartholemew on Tiberina island. Even going in “by mistake” or to find a bit of shade in a church, one risked encountering a friendly saint.
You can touch grace in the objectivity of the life of the Church which, like a mother, opens her Holy Doors.
You can touch grace also in the beauty of fraternal communion, over a good gelato! You can touch grace that enters into the hearts of a million young people in silence during a half-hour of Eucharistic adoration, kneeling on the dry fields of Tor Vergata, together with Pope Leo XIV. An article of the following days declared: “The spirit of our time -which is that of obsessive scrolling and the boredom of screens- seems to have rendered impossible that kind of extended period of attention, immobility and silence which accompanied the Eucharistic adoration. And yet it happened. It was as if all of the enormous crowd was holding its breath, moved and looking fixedly at the Holy of Holies that reverberated with light in the gold monstrance on the altar.”
You were invited to open yourself to grace, when the Pope said to all those young people that the thirst that burns in their lives must be listened to: ““Let us make a stool to climb on so that we can peer, like children, on tiptoe, at the window of our encounter with God. We will find ourselves before Him, who is waiting for us, indeed, who is gently knocking on the window of our soul. And it is beautiful, even at twenty years of age, to open our hearts wide to Him, to allow Him to enter, and then to venture with Him towards the eternal spaces of infinity.” This grace touched the soul of Youri, a young man like many others. He is strong, trains at the gym, and was baptized this Easter. On the way back to Grenoble, he told us: “This has been the most intense and enriching week of my life.”
