ROME — Salvation, holiness, and evangelization will share the stage with an overtly environmentalist program at World Youth Day 2023, the largest Catholic youth festival of the year.
Cardinal-elect Américo Aguiar, bishop of Lisbon and coordinator of World Youth Day (WYD) 2023, has insisted that the festival bear witness to “Integral Ecology,” noting that the event will not use printed paper and will employ other measures such as differentiated waste that “will oblige environmentally friendly behavior.”
For instance, all registered WYD participants will receive refillable water bottles, to avoid the use of disposable plastic bottles, reports The Pillar Catholic, and meal containers for the event are fully recyclable.
Bishops arrive for the start of the opening mass of the World Youth Day (WYD) gathering of young Catholics in Eduardo VII Park in Lisbon on August 1, 2023. (MIGUEL RIOPA/AFP via Getty Images)
The downloadable app that will take the place of printed pages carries a carbon footprint calculator, to allow attendees to compute how their travel and activities contribute to climate change. Pilgrims are encouraged to take part in activities such as tree-planting to offset their carbon footprint.
Placards offering recycling information are posted all around the WYD site, and pilgrims are encouraged not to waste food.
To some, Bishop Aguiar’s commitment to ecological conversion has seemed to overshadow his commitment to evangelization, causing consternation.
“We do not want to convert young people to Christ, or to the Catholic Church, or any of that,” the bishop said in a July 6 interview with Portuguese television.
World Youth Day aims to help young people walk together, respecting their differences, he said, allowing each young person to say: “I think differently, I feel differently, I organize my life differently, but we are brothers and we are going to build the future together.”
Portuguese and Spanish pilgrims pose for a group picture as they wait for the start of the opening mass of the World Youth Day (WYD) gathering of young Catholics in Eduardo VII Park in Lisbon on August 1, 2023. (THOMAS COEX/AFP via Getty Images)
“What we want is for it to be normal for a young Catholic Christian to say and bear witness to who he is, for young Muslims, Jews or those of another religion also to have no problem saying who they are,” the bishop declared, or for “a young person who does not profess any religion to feel at ease and not feel strange because he it is like that.”
It is important “that we all understand that difference is richness and the world will be objectively better if we are able to put in the heart of all young people this certainty of the fraternity of all brothers and sisters,” he said.
Pope Francis is slated to depart for Lisbon on Wednesday for the World Youth Day celebrations, which will run from August 2-6.
This will mark the fourth time Pope Francis presides over the global festival, following the World Youth Days in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2013), Krakow, Poland (2016), and Panama City, Panama (2019).