The following is a excerpt of Pope Leo XIV’s address to those gathered to celebrate the Chicago-born pope’s election:

… I’d like to send a special word of greeting to all the young people – those of you gathered together today, and many of you who are perhaps watching this greeting through technological means, on the internet. As you grow up together, you may realize, especially having lived through the time of the pandemic – times of isolation, great difficulty, sometimes even difficulties in your families, or in our world today. Sometimes it may be that the context of your life has not given you the opportunity to live the faith, to live as participants in a faith community, and I’d like to take this opportunity to invite each one of you to look into your own hearts, to recognize that God is present and that, perhaps in many different ways, God is reaching out to you, calling you, inviting you to know his Son Jesus Christ, through the Scriptures, perhaps through a friend or a relative… a grandparent, who might be a person of faith. But to discover how important it is for each one of us to pay attention to the presence of God in our own hearts, to that longing for love in our lives, for … searching, a true searching, for finding the ways that we may be able to do something with our own lives to serve others.

And in that service to others we may find that coming together in friendship, building up community, we too can find true meaning in our lives. Moments of anxiety, of loneliness. So many people who suffer from different experiences of depression or sadness – they can discover that the love of God is truly healing, that it brings hope, and that actually, coming together as friends, as brothers and sisters, in community, in a parish, in an experience of living our faith together, we can find that the Lord’s grace, that the love of God can truly heal us, can give us the strength that we need, can be the source of that hope that we all need in our lives.

To share that message of hope with one another – in outreach, in service, in looking for ways to make our world a better place – gives true life to all of us, and is a sign of hope for the whole world. …