Dozens of young people from across the Archdiocese of Chicago and their chaperones got an up close view of Pope Leo XIV on July 30 at the pope’s general audience, which occurred during the Jubilee of Youth during this jubilee year of hope.

Father Wayne Watts, pastor of Sts. Joseph and Francis Xavier Parish in Wilmette, has been leading teens on pilgrimages to serve the sick in Lourdes each summer for the past 30 years, usually with an additional pilgrimage site added to the program.

This year, Watts and about a dozen chaperones brought four dozen mostly high school students to Rome for the jubilee in addition to spending time in prayer, worship and service in Lourdes.

For the teenagers, seeing young Catholics from all over the world was definitely a highlight.

“We’re all here bonding over our common faith even though we speak different languages,” said Margot Hickey, who will be a senior at Loyola Academy in Wilmette in the fall. “It makes the church feel really united.”

Tyler Mills, who will be a senior at New Trier Township High School, said he saw that most on a day trip to Assisi, which was full of young people visiting Italy for the jubilee.

“There were a lot of different people from different places,” Mills said. “People would just jump in and start dancing, and people would join in. It was joyful.”

“Joy has been a big word for this pilgrimage,” Watts said.

The students, Sts. Joseph and Francis youth minister Noreen Russo and Watts spoke by phone from Rome on the evening of July 30, before heading to Paris the next day to catch their flight home.

They spent much of the day at the Vatican, getting their tickets for the pope’s general audience in St. Peter’s Square — tickets that allowed them right up front — and waving the Chicago flags provided by a chaperone to catch Pope Leo’s attention.

“It definitely worked,” Watts laughed. “He pointed at us both when he was making his way in and when he left.”

The pope, in his first scheduled appearance at the Vatican after a brief break at Castel Gandolfo, spoke about Jesus healing the deaf man in the Gospel of St. Mark (Mk 7:31-37).

“All of us experience what it means to be misunderstood, to feel that we are not truly heard,” Pope Leo said. “All of us need to ask the Lord to heal our way of communicating, not only so that we may be more effective, but also so that we may avoid wounding others with our words.”

“Dear brothers and sisters, let us ask the Lord that we may learn to communicate with honesty and prudence,” he said.

“Let us pray for all those who have been wounded by the words of others,” he said. “Let us pray for the church, that she may never fail in her mission to lead people to Jesus, so that they may hear his Word, be healed by it, and in turn become bearers of his message of salvation.”

After the audience, the group traveling with Watts waited about an hour in the Roman summer heat to pass through the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica.

“The group I was with spent that time talking to a group of Chaldean Catholics from Sweden,” Watts said.

More than 1 million youth, which in Europe means young people aged 18-30, took part in the Jubilee of Youth from July 28 to Aug. 3. The closing Mass alone drew more than 1 million young people, 500,000 more than organizers expected. The jubilee also included a gathering with Pope Leo of Catholic social media influencers.

Dominic Munaretto, a student at the University of Notre Dame, and Hickey served this year as leaders of small groups of pilgrims on Watts’ Lourdes pilgrimage after doing the pilgrimage last year.

Munaretto said the highlight of his time in Italy was seeing the pope, but also visiting churches and seeing all the artwork.

“The sculptures and the paintings and friezes,” he said. “It’s all different.”

In Lourdes, he was gratified to put the Italian he has learned in school to good use, helping two Italian women who traveled to Lourdes without a group who needed someone who could understand them.

Mills said the thing that most impressed him in Lourdes were the nightly rosary processions, during which he would usually join the choir. Despite being a musician — he plays piano and trombone — he doesn’t usually sing in the choir at church or in school at home.

“To be in that environment, it was good to just sing out,” he said.