On Palm Sunday, Pope Francis addressed hundreds of young people gathered in St. Peter’s square. He urged them to continue singing and shouting “hosanna,” just as the crowd of Jesus’ followers did as he entered Jerusalem.
He told the crowd, which included two survivors of the Ash Wednesday school massacre in Parkland, Fla., that some people were irritated by Jesus and tried to silence his followers. The same is true today, he noted, when people try to silence young people or manipulate them.
“There are many ways to silence young people and make them invisible,” he said. There are “many ways to anesthetize them, to make them keep quiet, question nothing. There are many ways to sedate them, to keep them from getting involved, to make their dreams flat and dreary, petty and plaintive.”
Then he encouraged them to resist silence, “Even if others keep quiet, if we older people and leaders keep quiet, if the whole world keeps quiet and loses its joy, I ask you: Will you cry out?”
Gabriella and Valentina Zuniga, teenage sisters who survived the Parkland, Fla., school shooting listened to his words as they held signs saying, “Never again” and “Protect our children, not our guns.”
The sisters and their mother had taken part the previous day in Rome’s March for Our Lives, one of 800 such marches held worldwide March 24 to call for stricter gun control laws in the wake of school shootings and other mass killings with firearms.
The march coincided with Rome’s local World Youth Day celebration. More than 300 young adults spent a week at the Vatican discussing the hopes, desires and challenges facing the world’s young people and ways the Catholic church should respond.
In the United States, school shootings have emerged as the most pressing concern of the country’s young people. They have appealed to lawmakers and fellow citizens to ban assault rifles and require universal background checks for gun purchases.
And they have the support of the Catholic Church in the United States, which has long-called for similar laws.
The young people, to the dismay of some adults — including powerful people in Louisville and beyond — are joining their voices to that of the bishops. They are crying out for common sense laws that could potentially save their own lives.
The Zuniga sisters are not being quiet. Nor are the thousand or so young people who marched through downtown Louisville March 24 in the local March for Our Lives.
And 31 Assumption students, who traveled to Washington, D.C., for the national March for Our Lives, don’t intend to be quiet.
They are scared of another school shooting. They are motivated. And, since attending the march, they are feeling inspired.
Alyssa Coulter, a senior at Assumption, said she feels compelled to act to help protect the lives of other children.
“We don’t want kids to have to go through what we’re going through,” she said during an interview after the march.
Sadly, young people are finding out the consequences of lifting their voices — that they may be attacked for their convictions.
Pope Francis offered some comforting words on Palm Sunday, that might be helpful to students facing unsympathetic adults in power.
The crowd shouting “crucify him” did not do so spontaneously, he said. They were incited by people who slandered and gave false witness against Jesus, “ ‘spinning’ facts and painting them such that they disfigure the face of Jesus and turn him into a ‘criminal,’ ” the pope explained.
Theirs was “the voice of those who twist reality and invent stories for their own benefit, without concern for the good name of others” and “the cry of those who have no problem in seeking ways to gain power and to silence dissonant voices.”
Faced with such a challenge, the pope urged the young people to look to the cross and “let ourselves be challenged by his final cry. He died crying out his love for each of us: young and old, saints and sinners, the people of his times and of our own.”
“We have been saved by his cross, and no one can repress the joy of the Gospel,” he said. “No one, in any situation whatsoever, is far from the Father’s merciful gaze.”
MARNIE McALLISTER
Editor
