Thousands of American Catholics head to Lisbon for World Youth Day event, Mass with Pope Francis

Aimee Celio of Fairfax, Virginia, wasn’t looking for love when she was part of a youth group that visited Rome in the summer of 1997 en route to the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day in Paris.

But while on a pilgrimage to historic church sites in the Eternal City, she met Bobby Celio, an architecture major at Virginia Tech. The two hit it off, cultivated a long-distance relationship while Mr. Celio completed his studies and then married.

Twenty-six years and five children later, the Celios are returning to Europe for a World Youth Day celebration, departing Saturday for the six-day event that runs Tuesday through Aug. 6 in Lisbon, Portugal. 

This time, three of their offspring — 20- and 15-year-old sons and a 17-year-old daughter — and dozens of other youth and young adults from the Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, will undertake the journey.

For the Arlington delegation, it will begin with two days at the Shrine at Fátima, where in 1917 three youngsters reported an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Then it’s on to Lisbon for the events of the pilgrimage.

Thinking back, Mrs. Celio, 47, insists she wasn’t praying for a relationship when she encountered her future husband.

“I’d kind of sworn off dating, so God has a sense of humor,” she said in a Zoom interview with her spouse. At the same time, she wouldn’t be too worried if her 20-year-old son, an aerospace engineering major at Virginia Tech, met a mate while in Portugal.

“Maybe it’s someone that would be great because I really feel like the people you meet there are there for the same purpose that you are, and have strong faith,” she said. “I think that’s really an incredible and very vital basis for a relationship.”

Her husband, now 46, admitted to some nervousness at their first encounter: “It took me a while to get up the confidence to talk to her a little bit more often,” Bobby Celio said.
He added that their “similar values” and “a love for Jesus, a love for our faith” drew the couple together and was “a firm foundation for the start of the relationship.”

The Lisbon event is taking place a year later than its anticipated date of 2022, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Despite the delay, one million or more are expected to attend an Aug. 6 Mass where Pope Francis will preside. The 86-year-old pontiff will arrive in Lisbon on Thursday for a welcome ceremony followed by public events over the next three days.

More than 1,300 groups comprising more than 28,600 individuals from across America plan to attend the event, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, making the U.S. delegation one of the five largest at the event.

According to Kevin Bohli, youth programs director for the Arlington diocese, the 130 WYD delegates he will lead on the pilgrimage is one of the largest U.S. groups, although “Boston is just a little bit larger than us,” he said.

“All the other groups that I know that are going [have] 10 to 15 people per diocese, per school, that sort of thing,” Mr. Bohli said.

“This is a wonderful occasion for young adults to have a significant encounter with Jesus Christ in the company of the universal Church,” Bishop Robert E. Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rocherster in Minnesota, said in a statement. “It is also a moment when the Holy Father and the Church’s leadership get an opportunity to listen to the young people present, teach and form them in the Gospel, and ultimately send them toward their vocation and mission in the world.”

The Rev. João Chagas, the Vatican official responsible for the WYD event, told Vatican Radio this week that “waiting for World Youth Day may [have grown] the desire of young people from all over the world to leave this meeting with Christ, with the Pope, with each other.”

Mr. Celio, who with his wife will chaperone a group from Nativity Catholic Church in Burke, Virginia, says he hopes their children and the other young delegates will gain “an amazing impression of the worldwide church and seeing these people from all over the world coming for this one thing and being united in our faith being united in this event, being united with the Pope. I think it’s a powerful experience, and I hope they can appreciate that experience.”

According to Mr. Bohli, the pilgrimage can be a time to “perhaps hear a call” to a religious vocation or “even just what occupation they feel called to.” The sacrifices of travel “are all little ways for us to grow in holiness and to grow in virtue,” he added.

“Our goal is that each one of us goes and returns a different person, a better person, a kinder person, a holier person as a result of this pilgrimage,” Mr. Bohli said.