Pope Francis announced the postponement by one year of the next World Youth Days (WYD) in Lisbon which will finally take place in August 2023 "because of the current health situation", the Vatican announced on Monday.
"Due to the current health situation and its consequences on the displacement and the gathering of young people and families", the pope postponed for a year the next WYD initially planned for August 2022, specifies the director of the room. Vatican press, Matteo Bruni, in a press release.
Flagship meetings postponed
The World Meeting of Families, originally scheduled for Rome in June 2021 and now scheduled for June 2022, has also been postponed for the same reasons. These two flagship events of the Catholic Church are organized every three years.
WYD, the world meeting of young Catholics, was instituted by John Paul II in 1986. After Rio in 2013, the year of his election, Krakow in 2016, Jorge Bergoglio, had attended in January 2019 a third edition WYD in Panama, a small Central American country of four million inhabitants. Some 200,000 young Catholics from 150 countries gathered there. The closing mass in Panama had gathered 700,000 people according to the organizers.
The last World Meeting of Families was organized in August 2018 in Dublin, where a final mass was organized for half a million faithful in a huge park.
Masses on video to prevent any propagation
To avoid any large-scale gathering, Pope Francis has been celebrating Masses for six weeks by video without the presence of the faithful. He also postponed his only officially announced trip for 2020, which was scheduled to Malta on May 31, to a later date.
In the Vatican City where Pope Francis lives, as well as in the “ministries” of the Holy See, activity is slowing down and strict sanitary measures have been put in place.
On Monday, a ninth case of someone positive for the new coronavirus was announced inside the Vatican micro-state: an employee transferred to a hospital to be placed under observation. The Holy See specifies that all the people who came into contact with this patient during the previous fifteen days have been tested "negative" for the virus. In late March, an Italian prelate living in the same hotel complex as Pope Francis had been infected, but the 83-year-old sovereign pontiff had not been touched.
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