Pope Leo XIV to 1 million young people in Buenos Aires: 'Who told you it was too late?'

Pope Leo XIV to 1 million young people in Buenos Aires: 'Who told you it was too late?'.

Pope Leo XIV prayed with around 1 million young people at an evening vigil in Buenos Aires on Tuesday, telling them it is never too late to answer God's call, Vatican News reported. The gathering at the Monumento de los Españoles was one of the largest events of his visit to Argentina.

Drawing on the Book of Daniel, the pope recalled the three young men thrown into a furnace in Babylon for refusing to bow before King Nebuchadnezzar's idol. "What freedom there is in that response!" he said, according to Vatican News.

He named today's idols directly: pornography and addictive substances, along with "success at any cost, money, an obsession with appearance, popularity or the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure." His appeal was simple: "Do not bow down before anything that cannot give you life. And if you have ever fallen, get back up."

The pope reached out to those who have drifted from faith. "There is a place for you in the Church, with your questions, your wounds and your story," Vatican News quoted him as saying. Picking up a question from one young woman's testimony, "Who told you that it was too late?", he said no one has "fallen so low that Christ cannot raise them up."

Several young people shared their stories, including Guadalupe, a 31-year-old postulant who described her struggle to find her vocation. Asked how to overcome frustration and personal limits, the pope quoted St. Ignatius of Loyola: act as if everything depended on you, knowing that in reality everything depends on God. On work, he pointed to Jesus' hidden years as a carpenter and urged the young to offer their work, study and friendships to God, so that work "becomes prayer and a path to holiness."

He closed by inviting them to become saints: "May your lives become pages of the Gospel, written in the ink of mercy." The vigil follows the pope's earlier stops in Uruguay and in Córdoba and Buenos Aires during his first Latin American journey since his cancer surgery.