(Vatican Radio) Nearly one million people have “liked” World Youth Day Rio’s Facebook
page in the run-up to the July 23-28 events in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As of Friday,
more than 969,000 people had clicked the “like” icon for WYD. You can find that and
all sorts of useful information on the official WYD 2013 site: www.rio2013.com.
In
his first apostolic journey abroad, in Brazil Pope Francis will lead many of the WYD
events including liturgies, the Via Crucis and a prayer vigil with young people. The
Pope leaves Rome on Monday, July 22 and returns to Rome Monday the 29th.
While there, he will also visit a drug rehabilitation center and a favela shanty town
and meet with a number of prisoners. He is also expected to announce the location
of the next World Youth Day.
One of the young people traveling to Brazil from
the United Kingdom is Mike Meadows from Liverpool. He says he has been going to the
Marian shrine of Lourdes (France) every year on pilgrimage for the last 8 or 9 years
or so and “I just felt like I really needed something else to build on the amazing
feeling of faith and community I felt in Lourdes – so I really wanted to go along
to (World Youth Day 2011) in Madrid.”
He says “I absolutely can’t wait!” to
go to Rio for his second WYD experience, see Pope Francis and to celebrate with young
people from around the world.
“I feel that the new pope is a really warm
guy, someone who’s looking to really open up the Church to everyone, especially young
people. I’m really looking forward to hearing what he has to say, particularly because
he’s a South American pope as well – I’m looking forward to seeing just how much World
Youth Day means to the people of South America, particularly the Brazilians and seeing
how they want to celebrate with Pope Francis.”
Mike hopes Pope Francis will
encourage young people to go out and “take ownership of our faith. I think that’s
something we all as young people… are really passionate about and I’d love to hear
how he’d like us to go out and take ownership of our faith and how he’d like us to
go out and spread the Word to everyone that it’s great to be a young Catholic at the
moment…. And how he’d like us to express ourselves as young Catholics.” Listen
to Mike's conversation with Tracey McClure: