Pope Leo XIV responds with a father’s heart to a 21 -year -old Roman young woman who asks what future? And what can young people do to aspire to a better world, when there are so many injustices, tragedies and wars currently?
Verónica, whose dream is to be a doctor, writes a felt letter to Leo XIV asking these and other questions to the Holy Father warning that all current problems seem like “impossible to live in peace,” according to the September edition of the September of the Revista Piazza San Pietro.
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Pope Leo XIV’s response
After encouraging Verónica to fulfill her dream to serve “the weakest and most unfortunate,” the Holy Father affirms that his “questions are those that have many of your contemporaries in the heart. It is true that we live difficult times: evil seems to overwhelm our lives, wars charge more innocent victims.”
“But all this should not make us lose hope in a better world. As I said citing St. Augustine: ‘Let’s live well and times will be good. We are the time.’ Similarly, the times will be good if we are good!” Leon continued.
“For this to happen we must put our hope again in the Lord Jesus. It is he who has raised in your heart the desire to make your life something big,” said the Pope.
“It is he who will give you strength to improve yourself and the society that surrounds you, so that the times we live are really good,” he said.
Remembering the jubilee of the young people who gathered in Rome one million people, Pope Leo XIV repeated “the invitation I made to you and all the young people who arrived in Tor Vergata: ‘Cultivate their friendship with Jesus.’ It is worth it, you can be sure.”
To conclude, the Holy Father asks Verónica to keep him “aware of your studies and your inner path. I bless you from the heart.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.