Palm Sunday: World Youth Day

(March 31.2012) Although it is well known that World Youth Day takes place every two to three years in a different city – most recently in Madrid, Spain – what is not as well known is that, for all the other years, World Youth Day will be celebrated on Palm Sunday, both in Rome and at the diocesan level. It is for this reason that the young people are given the opportunity to participate in Palm Sunday Mass in a particular way, being asked to process into St. Peter's Square carrying massive palms, in a poignant reminder of the first Palm Sunday which took place 2,000 years ago. "Today you are here again, dear friends," said Blessed John Paul II to the young people gathered in St. Peter's Square on Palm Sunday, 1986, "to begin in Rome, in St. Peter's Square, the tradition of World Youth Day, the celebration to which the entire Church was invited. From my whole heart I welcome you." The year after the Holy Father and the WYD Cross travelled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the first WYD to take place outside of Rome. "World Youth Day means just this," concluded Blessed John Paul II at WYD, 1986 "going to encounter God, who entered into the history of man by means of the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ. He entered in a way that cannot be undone. And he desires to meet you above all. And to each and every one of you he wants to say: "Follow me," Follow me. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life."