At our parish, we proposed to the young people to unite ourselves to the beauty of the Jubilee “Pilgrims of Hope” with a pilgrimage to the Holy Doors in the cathedral of our city, Asuncion.
The theme of vocation, which means the rupture of an “I” closed in its own merits and exposed before “Another” who never tires of calling, was the golden thread during the various miles that we walked towards the door that welcomes and attracts every person: the Holy Door, the Church.
I was pleasantly surprised that, before an open invitation to all, there were about 200 young people who came; in silence and in an atmosphere of recollection, they listened to the meditations and let themselves be guided by the prayer of the Rosary under the hot sun of our city.
The mentality of the world often impedes us from perceiving what Christ still has to offer to give meaning to our life
From the banks of the Paraguay river flows the center of our city, extending more and more, which almost hides the cathedral. This temple was built in a place that was intended to always be visible but modern architecture cancelled that intuition, founding the idea of a world that makes the Church invisible. “It is not an aesthetic problem; it is a culture that has captured even me,” one of the young people told me, almost with joy after having understood the sense of what we were speaking about.
The mentality of the world often impedes us from perceiving what Christ still has to offer to give meaning to our life. I believe that, on this day we shared, reality prevailed over words.
On the other hand, I was thinking of the great pedagogy of the Church that continues to emphasize tradition. The Jubilee, in and of itself, filled me with hope: on the one hand, seeing young people open and needing a word of comfort that only Christ and His Gospel can offer; on the other hand, seeing that what we have lived still has something to say to the entire world.
One young woman told me: “I have not understood everything, but every time that you mentioned Jesus with the microphone, in a public place, without shame and with so much energy so that people who listen, I thought: ‘It must be true’”.
