World Youth Day 25 years later: That was my night of fire

“That was the night of dreams for tens of thousands of young people. For me, that was my night of fire.” Thus summarizes Fr. Alfredo Tedesco, today responsible for the youth pastoral of the Diocese of Rome, his experience as a 17 -year -old in the World Youth Day of the year 2000 in the wide esplanade of Tor Vergata in southeast of Rome.

That place was deeply marked as a symbol of the encounter between the Pope and the youth of the world. A quarter of that event has passed, but the testimony of this priest reveals some of the feelings that half a million young people will live during the vigil with the Pope on August 2 and the conclusive mass on August 3.

“I didn’t even have the 18 fulfilled – I remember with some nostalgia – in theory I could not participate, but I had been helping as a volunteer in my parish and managed to join the group. I arrived almost without knowing how, I found myself in Tor Vergata that night of August 19. I did not have a clear vocation to the priesthood, but something began to germinate there.”

Of those days Fr. Tedesco remembers the face of San Juan Pablo II, the suffocating heat of that field without shadow, the endless walks, music, the tears of some classmates and music. But, above all, a phrase: “If you are what you should be, you will set fire to the world”, an appointment of Santa Catalina de Siena that the Polish Pope gave firmness and tenderness to the young people gathered in the threshold of the new millennium.

“That phrase pierced me,” he confesses today. ”

“I understood that it was not about being someone important, but of being ‘for someone.’ That touched my heart. And although he did not make me enter the seminar immediately, he left a seed that later germinated,” he says.

The echo of a vocation

The priestly vocation of Fr. Alfredo did not materialize up to five years later, precisely in the months in which the world fired John Paul II. “When the Pope died in 2005, something definitely lit on me. I entered the seminar shortly after. It was as if a cycle that had begun that night of the jubilee of 2000 was closed.”

Now, as responsible for the youth pastoral in Rome, this Italian priest accompanies thousands of young people in their path of faith.

Many of them were not even born when Tor Vergata first housed the young church of the world. “For today’s boys,” he says, “this will be their only Tor Vergata. They don’t have that memory of the year 2000, but I do, like me, so many. That’s why, I want to return to them that I received one day.”

A new sign for a new generation

In his eyes, Tor Vergata space has changed a lot. “Today there is a hospital, a university, a botanical garden … It is not the same immense and empty field of then. But symbolically, it remains what it was: the place where young people are called to light the world,” he explains.

In any case, for him, the new jubilee of young people with Pope Leo XIV is not simply a nostalgic reissue: “It is a real opportunity for others to live their own night of fire. I do not know what fruits this new vigil will give, but I know that God acts. Always.”

And he concludes, excited: “That night, without realizing it, I felt a vocational pruritus, a kind of interior tingling that changed my life. Today I can only thank and expect that, for many, 2025 is what 2000 was for me: the beginning of something big.”