Chapter One
Longing
The primary reason for evangelizing is the love of Jesus which we have received, the experience of salvation which urges us to ever greater love of him. What kind of love would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known?
If we do not feel an intense desire to share this love, we need to pray insistently that he will once more touch our hearts. We need to implore his grace daily, asking him to open our cold hearts and shake up our lukewarm and superficial existence. (Evangelii Gaudium 264)
A few months after the election of Pope Francis, my Jesuit High School students and I went to sleep hungry on a Brazilian beach, surrounded by three million people as the icy surf washed toward us.
We were spending a chilly July night on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, waiting for Francis to celebrate Mass with us in the morning. It was the closing liturgy of World Youth Day and the Brazilian winter (June–August) was in full swing.
That night, July 27, we shivered in our sleeping bags. Earlier in the day, the sun had cooked us for hours with a withering heat. Florida felt very far away.
As temperatures fell steadily during the evening, it was tough to rest peacefully. Our students built little sand walls to block the wind and to keep the freezing ocean spray from blasting us. These walls also gave us an illusion of privacy: The entire 2.5-mile beach was crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with snoring pilgrims, tents, and camping gear.
Our sleep was marked by the taste of salt water, the sound of waves crashing rhythmically on the beach, and the feeling of cold sand digging into our backs. When we got hungry, we nibbled on a little canned tuna and dry snacks which organizers had handed out in boxes before police closed the beach.
To our dismay, the only thing less comfortable than the beach itself was the row of portable toilets lined up alongside it. With beach exits closed and nowhere else to go, organizers had vastly underestimated the number of pilgrims, and some of the facilities were overflowing. It wasn’t sheep we smelled that night.
Francis, whose motorcade passed our group after he arrived by helicopter in the morning, celebrated Mass from an enormous platform, visible to us only through giant television screens spread out along the beach. We were at least two miles away from him.
One of our students, staking out a spot right next to the beachside road, found himself at the front of a cheering crowd as Francis drove by that morning.
When the papal motorcade paused briefly for Francis to wave at some beachfront apartment windows, where people leaned out to greet him, our student snapped a crystal-clear photograph of the pope with his digital camera. He was on cloud nine.
The Mass itself turned out to be a lively mix of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin hymns — all set to joyful music that led the Brazilian pilgrims to dance.
While many of the guys in our group longed to receive Jesus in the Eucharist, or to at least be closer to Francis, the crowd was so big that most of us could not get anywhere near a communion station. Two of our students who hadn’t eaten a hot meal in twelve hours were so tired that they simply slept through half of the liturgy, curled up in a fetal position.
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
