Faith Features

The Pope, Fatima, and World Youth Day

February 26, 2024
James Pritchett
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“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob.” (Is. 2:3)

I’m typically the kind of Catholic who likes to slip into the back of the church for Mass without being noticed and assailed by the standard mob of greeters, well-wishers, and ushers. I remember being terrified when I was not yet even a Catholic but was asked to help with the collection during Mass and could only give a paralyzed nod in response. My mother, however, drilled into me from a young age that one of the worst sins I could commit would be to pass up a potentially once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Thus, this past summer, I took the chance to go on a paid trip to World Youth Day on behalf of the Knights of Columbus.

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As a member of the College Council Advisory Board (an internship with the Knights of Columbus that I was privileged to have throughout 2023), I traveled with a group of other young Knights to World Youth Day 2024 hosted in Lisbon. Before I went I only had vague notions of what it would be like, all of which were dissipated once I arrived. Instead of giving a summary of all the various escapades I went on and the perilous dangers that I endured, I will instead hone in on a few key events that helped bring my faith into focus, the first being my encounter with Pope Francis.

Encounter is certainly an overstatement for what it was. After walking down a side street toward one of our scheduled talks, we heard a commotion and ran to the barricade just in time to see the Pope drive right past us. Despite its brevity and lack of hubbub, however, in this encounter I realized something rather simple but counterintuitive; the Pope is human. Rather than feeling discontent, I felt a relief that it’s an ordinary man who leads the Church. My years of apologetics and defenses of the papacy as an abstract concept made me forget that Pope Francis, like every pope back to St. Peter, is a man in need of God’s help like the rest of us.

My encounter with Our Lady at Fatima helped me see my own place in that great communion of sinners called the Church. There is a certain temptation to despair that we can experience when we are confronted with our own weaknesses and sins in the face of such great holiness; the visionary Sts. Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco gave no shortage of evidence of that. I realized, however, that Our Lady is a dispenser and reservoir of God’s grace that I cannot hope to match with my sins. Seeing penitents go down onto their knees to crawl some 600 feet to the site of the apparitions and before the statue of Our Lady of Fatima gave me hope that I too, by the grace of God and the intercession of Our Lady, may become a saint like those who saw her. The sheer number of pilgrims who came, however, showed me that the Church is not dead. As a Catholic who tends to run in traditionalist circles, I hear a lot about how the Church is losing to the culture and stands in imminent need of radical correction if it is to be salvaged at all. Getting to share a city with some 1.5 million young Catholic pilgrims desiring to engage deeper in their faith gave me a different, and admittedly refreshing, picture of the situation. That does not mean that the Church is not in need of reform at every level (it has since St. Paul was writing his letters), but that true, authentic reform is possible and there are people who are willing to make it happen. I simply believe that the prophets, the apostles, and Our Lord were right when they said that one day all the nations would “go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob.”

James Pritchett
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