Young Jubilee: The Plaza de San Pedro will close for 23,000 Spaniards

The Plaza de San Pedro will close on August 1 to host more than 23,000 Spaniards registered in the Jubilee of Young people, accompanied by more than 50 Spanish bishops, including cardinals Juan José Omella and José Cobo and the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), Mons. Luis Argüello.

The president of the Episcopal Subcommittee for Youth and Childhood, Mons. Arturo Ros, the president of the Episcopal Commission for Lay, Family and Life, Mons. Carlos Escribano, and more than 700 priests will also be attended.

During a press conference offered this Thursday at the headquarters of the EEC, Mons. Argüello explained that this extraordinary act will allow “to make communion very visible between us, the participants of the various ecclesial realities of Spain and also the communion with the Church of Rome, now chaired by a new Pope.”

The director of the Department of Minister of Youth of the EEC, P. Raúl Tinajero, stressed that “we are facing a historical event, because it will be the first time that there is a meeting only of Spaniards, we would say, organized by the Spaniards, of course, in collaboration with the Vatican.”

Fr. Tinajero also explained that “even the basilica of San Pedro is closed”, so that it will be the only act of these characteristics in Rome that day. Two years ago, in Estoril (Portugal), the Spaniards held a similar meeting in the framework of the World Youth Day to which 45,000 pilgrims attended.

For the celebration of this singular meeting that will take place on Friday afternoon of next week, the authorities will close the accesses to the Plaza de San Pedro from 13:30, local time, and will be reopened at 4:00 p.m.

The development of the act will begin at 6:00 p.m., and there will be three acts entitled “The Gift of Life”, “The Joy of Forgiveness” and “I am the door that opens up happiness” in which the Aquila Symphony Orchestra will intervene, a youth choir and a group of choreography that “will also try to bring the word in a striking way for young people” The Tinajero added.

“Five star soils”

For the development of this unprecedented act, CEE has the collaboration of 500 volunteers from different Spanish dioceses that, with the rest of pilgrims, make up the first group by nationality in the jubilee of young people after the Italians and ahead of those that arrive from nearby countries such as France and Portugal.

This implies a huge logistics that is still being finalized: “We are still in this last stage of complying and placing these thousands of young people in which they are going to be their, understanding the joke, ‘five -star floors’, because they will have to be located in pavilions, schools, in a lot of places that have offered us from the organization of the jubilee to be able to welcome them and be able to pernate them.

The CEE hopes that in these last days the total number of Spanish pilgrims can approach 40,000 through the “modality C” provided by the jubilee, which refers to the participation in the weekend of August 2 and 3 and that will constitute the first great meeting of Pope Leo XIV with the young Catholics of the world that, according to forecasts, will be more than one million.