In his homily, delivered in Spanish over loudspeakers, Francis summarized the week’s festivities by asking us one last time to be missionaries of God’s love. “Go be missionaries,” he declared, echoing the World Youth Day 2013 theme song.
After Mass, a spontaneous beach party erupted. The sun had risen to its blistering midday height, blanketing the beach in a growing heat wave. In response, thousands of overheated pilgrims jumped into the ocean to refresh themselves with cold water. Others stayed on the beach and danced as Catholic musicians performed for us from the sanctuary platform.
Although we were still hungry, we felt joy and peace from the spiritual nourishment we shared at Mass. We also felt physical relief from being able to move around more freely as the beach gradually emptied.
For more than an hour, our students waded in the water with fellow pilgrims from around the world, cooling off and splashing each other happily. Meanwhile, a Jesuit priest and I did a live beachside interview for EWTN’s Life on the Rock television program, being rewarded with complimentary bottles of water. The water was the best part for me, as we had run out of liquids on the beach.
Copacabana felt like a fitting end to our long and grueling week. We had spent several days hauling ourselves around Rio, where the public transit system kept breaking down and running into delays. Rarely did we end up exactly where we wanted to be. Even our two attempts to visit the city’s iconic statue of Christ the Redeemer had been thwarted, once by fog and once by an excessive number of pilgrims that stretched the wait into several hours beyond our departure time for the flight home.
Because the number of World Youth Day pilgrims overwhelmed the city, our group of fifty students and chaperones had also been bumped from the nice parish gym where we were supposed to sleep during our first six nights in the city. Instead we ended up bunking down on the dirty floors of a public elementary school in one of Rio’s slums — a favela where nightly sirens and gunshots obliged us to keep the front doors locked. There were bars on the windows.
Throughout the week, I took photographs and wrote a daily blog for our students’ parents on the school website, giving them updates of our adventures. Wi-Fi service was almost nonexistent.
We went to Copacabana Beach several times for evening liturgies, including a welcome Mass with the local archbishop and a live Stations of the Cross with Pope Francis. At the latter, a flatbed trailer carried the actors and actresses dramatizing the last hours of Christ’s life to different points along the beach, working up to a finale on the sanctuary platform where Francis awaited it.
In some ways, our frequent trips to Copacabana for liturgies were a nice change of pace from the slum where we stayed. Each morning that week, we took ice-cold showers in a rusty bathroom at the school. We celebrated Mass in a dingy gathering area, squatting in chairs designed for little children.
Some of our students got sick from gorging on junk food and catching germs in the streets. Our first aid kit soon yielded up most of its antibiotics, digestive medications, and salves for insect bites.
Yet in spite of these challenges, nobody wanted to quit. Every day we toured a different part of the city, visiting World Youth Day events and sites wherever we found them. Spontaneous encounters with youth groups from other countries, even from other Jesuit high schools in various parts of the world, marked our wanderings.
We ate whatever food we could find, from whoever was selling it. We stopped to pray or rest at whatever Catholic parishes we stumbled across. Every parish in the city was open to us.
One morning, as we rode the train from our slum to the city center, we saw the pope’s police escort parked at a favela he was visiting near ours. Since the city’s poor couldn’t come to Francis, he had gone to them. He also visited a Franciscan ministry to drug addicts.
Despite spotty news and Internet service, we later learned Francis had exhorted Catholics in a speech that day to “flip the tortilla,” asking us to shake things up and make a joyful noise.
A real tortilla would have delighted our students, who spent most of the trip alternating between fatigue and hunger as we fought our way through endless crowds on the public transit system. For our students, it was an exciting life experience outside the comfortable routine of home. For the Jesuits and young adult chaperones, all veterans of high school trips, it was a new threshold of exhaustion.
We certainly felt like we were on the margins that week, whether we wanted to be there or not. Tired and hungry, we shared the life of the city and its pilgrims for seven days, but we also shared the life of the slums in a small way. Each morning brought fresh adventures and new encounters with the needy.
From Paraguay to the Slums of Rio
By heading into Rio’s slums to visit the poor that week, it appeared to us that Francis was living out his message: Go to the margins and see whom you find there. Don’t give advice or try to interpret the suffering of others, but place yourself with them in solidarity. Talk and pray with them.
After a weeklong pilgrimage to ruined Jesuit missionary sites in Paraguay, including the magnificent Iguazu Falls and other places depicted in the film The Mission, our little group already felt a bit on the margins by the time we arrived in Rio for World Youth Day.
During the week in Paraguay, daily prayer and faith sharing accompanied our interactions with people. We even prayed before the exposed heart of St. Roque González, a Jesuit missionary known as the “apostle of Paraguay,” in its glass reliquary at a Jesuit high school in the capital of Asunción. In 1628, an Indian witch doctor, jealous of González’s influence over the natives, conspired successfully to kill the priest with an axe.
In Paraguay, the unexpected became routine. At one point, our bus broke down, and we went on a five-mile hike through the subtropical fields and forests, meeting more farm animals than people along the way. Another day, we celebrated Mass in the grassy ruins of an ancient Jesuit mission church.
We met indigenous peoples. Coming to a Guarani Indian village, accessible only by foot paths and bridges through the forest some distance from the nearest active Jesuit mission in San Ingacio Guazu, we spent a day bartering with the chief as our boys kicked a soccer ball around with the village kids. The village consisted of a few dirt paths and thatched-roof huts; the chief wore a soccer jersey.
Our students loved the first week in Paraguay perhaps even more than the second week in Rio. Like Francis, they seemed to enjoy visiting with people more than attending the big public events.
And the parents supported our students. Rather than spending money on a summer vacation to Disney or Cancún, the families of our students paid to send them on a religious pilgrimage to visit Jesuit missions and pray with the Holy Father in South America.
Instead of playing video games and sitting on the couch all summer, our students spent two weeks living in a foreign-language environment, sleeping on trains, and singing songs with young people from other countries. They loved it.
But Pope Francis, then seventy-six years old, seemed to be outpacing all of us.
Using his police escort to full advantage, Francis traveled all over Rio during the week of World Youth Day, appearing to us in fleeting glimpses on news broadcasts and at the beach each night as we crowded to attend the various liturgies he led there.
Despite an exhausting schedule, the Holy Father took his time with each person he met. On the day his plane landed in Rio, admirers mobbed Francis’s car when it took a wrong turn after leaving the airport, alarming security personnel. Smiling, Francis simply rolled down his window and started chatting with people who rushed up to the car. He was in no hurry.
Large crowds greeted him everywhere with a musical chant, delivered in a cadence familiar to World Youth Day veterans: “Papa Francisco!”
In the open motorcade that took Francis to the sanctuary platform at Copacabana Beach each day, he frequently stopped to bless babies and talk with onlookers.
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