The Irish Pilgrims
Thousands of young people gathered in Assisi in early August to participate in the Go! Franciscan Youth Gathering. Among them were a group of YouFra members and others from Ireland led by Friars Jacobo and Ronan from the Galway Fraternity.
The Irish group walked for four days in pilgrimage to Assisi to participate in the celebration of the Feast of the Portiuncula, the Pardon of Assisi on 2 August, followed by the youth gathering.
Pope Leo came to Assisi on 6 August to join the gathering, listening to and responding to the young people.
In his homily at the Mass celebrated before the chapel of the Portiuncula, the Pope spoke of the person and message of Saint Francis:
Dear friends, the reason why Saint Francis still draws us to himself, even eight hundred years after his death, lies in the grandeur of humanity that led him to abandon familiar ways in order to find a new path that is more consistent with that of Jesus. Even in a town that had been Christian for centuries, such as Assisi, this seemed revolutionary. “Clare’s choice was even more striking: a girl who wanted to be like Francis, who wanted to live, as a woman, as free as those brothers!” (Jubilee Audience, 4 October 2025). This is the energy of Christianity — the energy of its beginnings and of its many new beginnings.
Well then, dear young people, today Europe and the whole world are looking to you to be new saints. Dare to believe in the word of the Gospel; become fully human with the freedom of Jesus Christ; embrace Sister Poverty! The title of your gathering, Go!, is a mission, a sending forth onto paths for which we have no maps, because they are opened by listening to the heart, obeying the Holy Spirit, and following the Risen One wherever he has chosen to go before us. Go! Go! Or better yet: let us go! Let’s go to the margins, where the injustice and arrogance of a few deny the dignity and dreams of many, of far too many sons and daughters of God. Pope Francis, drawing inspiration from the Poverello of Assisi, warned us against the temptation “to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune” (Evangelii Gaudium, 270).
We may not be understood, even by those closest to us, as happened to Saint Francis. Yet, breaking free from the culture of power, and tearing down the walls that separate human beings from one another, is never a betrayal of our families, towns or traditions. Instead, it means freeing them from their ghosts, from enemies invented out of fear or ignorance and from the violence with which people seek to impose their own limited order on a reality that surpasses us on every side. To trust in God is to rediscover, like Francis and Clare, a world of brothers and sisters to cherish and serve, not to exploit and dominate. Not a world to defend, but to embrace.
Commit yourselves, dear young people, to the civilization of love, whose first signs you have encountered in so many examples of selfless giving, and which — in the image of Christ — transforms countless peacemakers who, even today, are committed to serving life in the most tragic situations of death. Unite the best energies of your magnificent humanity: your studies, skills, work, friendships, love and prayer, so that you can bring Saint Francis’ vision to life in many different ways.
I imagine you hold dear the prayer often attributed to him, a text from the last century:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offence, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
That is “where” to go. But here, especially, is “how” to go:
O Lord, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in forgiving that one is forgiven,
it is in dying that one awakens to eternal life.
Dear friends, may these days in Assisi remain etched in your memory, and may your return home, to the various countries of Europe to which you will travel, be like the descent of Peter, James and John from the high mountain of the Transfiguration. May your return be reflective, open to the future and committed to Jesus Christ. He trusts you, counts on you and remains always with you.
