Group of pilgrims from the Archdiocese of St. Louis attended World Youth Day in Portugal
At the World Youth Day welcome ceremony with Pope Francis on Aug. 3, Annie Struckhoff and a group of pilgrims from St. Louis stood in the middle of Lisbon’s Eduardo VII Park, gathering near a radio transmitting the Holy Father’s remarks.
The 22-year-old, who recently graduated from Benedictine College and will soon start her first job as a nurse, was touched by the pope’s message, in which he encouraged young people to keep asking questions.
“Asking questions is good,” he said, “it is often better than giving answers, because those who ask questions remain restless, and restlessness is the best remedy” for a routineness that can “anesthetize the soul.”
“As a young adult, someone who is transitioning from school to adulthood and making big changes in my life, there’s a lot of restlessness in my life right now,” said Struckhoff, a member of St. Clement of Rome Parish in Des Peres. The pope “seemed very understanding to the world that we live in and what society looks like right now. As young adults, we will have questions as we are still figuring out this life and trying to go through it with the Lord. I believe our restlessness leads us closer to the Lord, ultimately.”
More than 100 pilgrims from the Archdiocese of St. Louis joined hundreds of thousands of people from around the world for World Youth Day in Lisbon, Portugal, Aug. 1-7. The trip was organized through the Office of Young Adult Ministry in collaboration with the Office of Youth Ministry. The next World Youth Day will be hosted in 2027 in Seoul, South Korea, Pope Francis announced.
In his Aug. 3 remarks, Pope Francis also told participants that God has called each person to Him by name, not their social media handle.
While social networks know young people’s names, tastes and preferences, “all this does not understand your uniqueness, but rather your usefulness for market research,” he said.
The “illusions” of the virtual world “attract us and promise happiness” but later show themselves to be “vain, superfluous things, substitutes that leave us empty inside,” the pope said. “I’ll tell you something, Jesus is not like that; He believes in you, in each one of you and us, because to Him each one of us is important, and that is Jesus.”
That message resonated with Father Tony Ritter, who recently became assistant vocations director for the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
“He emphasized that the Lord knows us by name,” Father Ritter said. “Our names are on social media accounts and attached to algorithms deciding what ads to show us. But that’s not how the Lord knows us. He knows who we are — all of our good parts and messiness — and the Lord delights in us and loves us.”
Also part of the St. Louis pilgrimage were 21 young adults and teens from Vincentian Marian Youth Southeast Missouri, a Catholic community dedicated to bringing young people to Jesus through faithful devotion to the Blessed Mother and Vincentian charisms. The group spent a year preparing for the trip through fundraising and a grant from the Daughters of Charity’s Mission and Ministry Impact program.
Before heading to Lisbon, pilgrims made a stop at the Shrine of Fatima to visit the site the Blessed Mother appeared more than 100 years ago to three shepherd children — Lucia dos Santos and her cousins, Jacinta and Francisco Marto.
Joseph Flieg was in awe visiting the pilgrimage site for the first time. “It was beautiful seeing this is what the Catholic Church is: all of us from all corners of the world — Brazil, America, Germany and others,” said the 18-year-old and recent graduate of Valle Catholic High School in Ste. Genevieve. “I think I have seen people from every continent except Antarctica. Everyone is here celebrating Christ.”
Claudia Otte also noticed the universal nature of the Church evident in the many countries represented at World Youth Day. The 19-year old, until moving away to college, had spent her entire life in Perryville as a member of St. Vincent de Paul Parish. She was encouraged by Bishop Robert Barron, who told pilgrims not to be afraid to go out of their comfort zone when it comes to evangelization.
“He told us to be bold in faith and not always fall back to that safety aspect of my life,” she said. “We need to be willing to take risks with evangelizing.”
Bishop Barron’s words also inspired Linda Deposki, a parishioner at Our Lady of Providence in Crestwood.
“One of the big things to me was the idea of how much we’re loved, and how we can help show that love to the world. We can bring — something Bishop Barron said — not the watered-down Christ, but the real Christ to the world. And that’s what’s going to set the world on fire,” she said.
Amid the hundreds of thousands of other young people, Deposki was amazed at how she still experienced God’s love for her in a deeply personal way during the pilgrimage.
“One of the big things I’ll bring back is just trying to evangelize more, trying to really spread the idea of just how deep God’s love is and how personal it is for each and every one of us,” she said.
Amber Buchheit first attended World Youth Day in 2008 in Sydney. Fifteen years later, she experienced the same awe of the universal Church, but she also saw God working in smaller, quieter moments.
One of her favorite parts of the trip was meeting a young woman who worked at a hotel across the street from where the group was staying in Lisbon. One night, the young woman heard them playing praise and worship music, and she came over to listen. The next night, she came back to pray with them again and started asking questions about the faith with the help of a translator app.
“We just sometimes have no idea how the Holy Spirit is going to choose to work and choose to use us,” said Buchheit, a parishioner at the Oratory of Sts. Gregory and Augustine.
For Nick Perry of St. Raphael the Archangel Parish in south St. Louis, some of Pope Francis’ simplest words made the biggest impact: “Todos, todos, todos. There’s room for everybody in the Church,” Perry said.
His World Youth Day experience will continue to inspire him as he returns to living his faith in the day-to-day, he said.
“I feel like sometimes it can be difficult to be a young Catholic in today’s society, and I gained so much strength and courage when seeing young Catholics from across the world,” he said. “There’s so many people who face similar challenges but also share similar joys and beauties. And it’s really, really worth it.”
