On Aug. 3–4, 2025, more than a million young pilgrims poured onto Tor Vergata’s open fields for the Jubilee of Youth, turning the outskirts of Rome into a living icon of the Church’s future. Flags from 150 nations fluttered above backpacks and sleeping bags while Pope Leo XIV told the crowd, “You are a sign that a different world is possible.” His message, that fraternity can outshine conflict and despair, mirrored the very desire animating the National Eucharistic Revival in the United States: a Church whose center of gravity is youthful, public, and Eucharistic.
Revival leaders have often said the Real Presence must move from doctrinal margin to pastoral center; Pope Leo supplied a concrete roadmap. Inviting the young to “aspire to great things, to holiness, wherever you are,” he urged them to cultivate friendship with Christ through prayer, Adoration, Eucharistic Communion, frequent Confession, and generous charity, “following the examples of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati and Blessed Carlo Acutis.”
Those two exemplars will be canonized together in Rome on September 7. Pier Giorgio, the athletic mountaineer who signed his letters Verso l’alto, “Toward the Heights,” spent his short life hauling medicine up Turin’s tenement stairwells. Carlo, who died of leukemia at fifteen in 2006, built a website cataloging Eucharistic miracles, attended daily Mass, and spent his allowance on sleeping bags for homeless men outside Milan’s train station. His use of technology as a tool for evangelization demolishes the false choice between digital savvy and sacramental devotion. For young Catholics tempted to think sanctity is either antiquarian or unreachable, Acutis and Frassati answer with a two-word challenge, “Why not?”
The energy released at the Jubilee of Youth, the zeal pulsing through U.S. parishes during the Eucharistic Revival, and the mounting anticipation of September’s dual canonization are cresting into a luminous crescendo of grace. Together they remind us that the Church is renewed not by managerial triage but by saints. And saints forged not in conference rooms, but in chapels before the Blessed Sacrament. The Revival’s success will depend less on programmatic ingenuity than on whether local communities can re-create the spirit of Tor Vergata’s silent, moonlit Adoration: thousands of teenagers kneeling in an open field, phones tucked away, horizons widened by the Real Presence of Christ.
Pope Leo concluded the Jubilee Mass by entrusting the pilgrims to Mary and sending them out as “seeds of hope” to every corner of the globe. In the United States, those seeds now fall on ground prepared by three years of Eucharistic Revival. Their growth will depend on young Catholics discovering, just as Carlo and Pier Giorgio did, that the Church’s greatest treasure is not an abstract idea but a living Person who waits behind the tabernacle door, and that friendship with him is anything but ordinary. The map has already been drawn; all that remains is for us to walk its path.
To learn more about Carlo Acutis and his devotion to the Eucharist, check out Castletown Media’s documentary Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality. Stream it now at watchcredo.com and let the “saint in sneakers” guide your community along the highway to heaven.
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Tim Moriarty is a filmmaker, actor, and founder & CEO of Castletown Media, a production company dedicated to work that reflects truth, beauty, and goodness. Recent credits include Mother Teresa: No Greater Love (2022, Knights of Columbus) and Jesus Thirsts: The Miracle of the Eucharist (2024), both the highest-grossing faith-based documentary releases of their years. His latest feature, Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality, premiered nationwide in April 2025 and is now streaming at watchcredo.com.
