Pope Leo XIV presided over the Holy Mass for the feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord this Thursday at the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in the Porziuncola of Assisi, together with the participants of the GO! Franciscan Youth Meeting 2026, an event organized by the Franciscan family on the occasion of the eighth centenary of the death of Saint Francis.
The celebration marked the conclusion of the pastoral visit that the Pontiff made to the Italian city.
Taking the Gospel account of the Transfiguration as his starting point, the Pope presented this mystery as an invitation to discover in Christ the meaning of history and of one’s own vocation.
Drawing inspiration from the example of Saint Francis and Saint Clare, he encouraged the young people to welcome the Gospel “without discounts,” to overcome “resignation and fear,” and to respond generously to God’s call.
During the homily, Leo XIV stated that the present world needs a new generation of saints capable of living the Gospel amid contemporary challenges. “Europe and the entire world are looking to you for new saints,” he affirmed, before urging the participants to go out to meet those living on the peripheries and to contribute, from faith, to building a more fraternal society.
The Pontiff linked this call to the Franciscan charism, presenting Saint Francis and Saint Clare as examples of a life transformed by Christ.
In this context, he invited the young people to place their abilities, studies, work, and relationships at the service of peace and the dignity of every person, following the mandate contained in the meeting’s motto: «Go!».
Below we leave the complete homily of Leo XIV:
Dear brothers and sisters, dear young people!
The feast of the Transfiguration that we are celebrating is a mystery of light that helps us to deepen our encounter, so joyful, yet also filled with questions about the present and the future.
In the Gospel account we find the contrast between light and shadow, silence and words, wonder and incomprehension.
We are in Assisi, a city to which for centuries countless pilgrims have ascended - today we too - because here everything whispers that our life can change form, radiate light, and repair the world.
Here began the transfiguration of Francis, of Clare, and later of thousands of other young people: they welcomed the Gospel sine glossa - we would say today: without discounts -and the life of Jesus began again in them.
We have come here to understand where history is going and where we ourselves are going. In the Gospel we see that it is possible to find meaning, to glimpse a path. Like Peter, James, and John, we too are led apart, and Jesus is with us. That is what matters: his presence.
On the mountain, the apostles contemplate Jesus orienting himself toward his own future. On this point there had been misunderstanding among them.
Six days earlier, Peter had reproached the Master for speaking openly of the cross (cf. Mt 16, 21-26): he expected glory for the Messiah and perhaps also for himself, without counting on resistance or risks and, above all, without asking what glory really is.
Now, in the transfiguration of Jesus, it is God himself who reveals himself in his glory, which has the appearance of a cloud that protects and envelops. He points to the Son and invites us to listen to him.
The path of life is discovered by following him together. Its beauty takes on a new aspect, an unprecedented intensity, to the point that Peter would like to stop time and prolong that vision.
Generously, he offers to build three tents, as if he wanted to see the conversation between Jesus, Moses, and Elijah continue.
But one must enter into that conversation. One cannot remain merely a spectator.
We are called to read the Scriptures with the Master, to interpret our time, and to make decisions following his way.
We are here to overcome resignation and fear, to dispel the doubts that also hold us back, as they held back the apostles. Jesus calls us to dialogue with his history in order to write new pages of history.
As we listen that “his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Mt 17:2), we think of the morning of Easter, when an angel of the Lord rolled away the stone that closed the tomb and announced the resurrection. “His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow” (Mt 28:3).
It is the light of a new day toward which we are oriented, while around us, and sometimes also within us, darkness still reigns. We see its dawn in the canonized saints, such as Saint Francis and Saint Clare, and in a multitude of brothers and sisters who respond to evil with good.
We are not alone! In these days you have experienced it: you have met and listened to one another, moving from the noise of dominant and opposing voices to the art of conversation.
Today we contemplate Jesus transfiguring himself precisely in conversation with the Father, with those who preceded him, Moses and Elijah, and with his contemporaries, the disciples.
The Church exists to introduce us into this dynamism of listening and decision, in which we understand for whom to live and how to live.
It is the community in which we learn to distinguish the voice of God, which never simply coincides with our opinions, and to dare that obedience to the Holy Spirit which made all those who accepted following Jesus bold and creative: we are disfigured when we separate ourselves from Him and from others; on the contrary, we are transfigured in the bonds that nourish life and call us to it.
Franciscan spirituality, in which you have been formed, is one of the most attentive to restoring fundamental relationships with God and with all his creatures: a harmony that today, more than ever, we must guard and cultivate.
In this sense, at the beginning of my first Encyclical I suggested that “each generation receives as inheritance the task of giving shape to its own time: of maturing history as a place where the dignity of every person is protected, justice promoted, and fraternity made possible.
But upon every age weighs the risk of building an inhuman and more unjust world. Where humanity is in danger of losing its face, we Christians raise our gaze to the God who became flesh, knowing that ‘only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man find true light.’
This magnificent humanity in Jesus Christ becomes the Way, the Truth, and the Life, opening for each of us the path to grow toward fullness” (Magnifica humanitas, 1).
Dear friends, the reason why Saint Francis, eight hundred years after his death, continues to attract us lies in the magnificent humanity that led him to abandon the already traced paths in order to open a new one, more consistent with the way of Jesus.
Even in a city already Christian for centuries, like Assisi, this seemed revolutionary.
“The choice of Clare was even more impressive: a young woman who wanted to be like Francis, who wanted to live, as a woman, free like those brothers!” (Jubilee Audience, October 4, 2025). That is the energy of Christianity, that of its beginnings and that of its multiple rebirths.
Well then, dear young people, today Europe and the entire world are looking to you for new saints: dare to believe in the word of the Gospel, become fully human with the freedom of Jesus Christ, embrace Sister Poverty.
The title of your meeting - Go! - is a mission, a sending forth along paths for which we have no maps, because they open by listening to the heart, obeying the Spirit, and following the Risen One where he has chosen to precede us. Go! Go! Or better still: Let us go! Let’s go! Toward the peripheries, where the injustice and arrogance of a few deny the dignity and dreams of many, of too many sons and daughters of God.
Pope Francis, inspired by the Poverello of Assisi, warned us against the “temptation of being Christians while keeping a prudent distance from the wounds of the Lord. Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others.
He expects us to renounce seeking those personal or communal shelters that allow us to keep our distance from the core of the human drama” (Francis, Evangelii gaudium, 270).
It is possible not to be understood, even by those of one’s own household, as happened to Saint Francis.
However, withdrawing from the culture of power and tearing down the walls that separate human beings never means betraying the family, the city, or tradition, but rather freeing them from their ghosts, from enemies invented by fear and ignorance, from the violence with which one seeks to impose one’s own limited order upon a reality that surpasses us on all sides.
Trusting in God is rediscovering, like Francis and Clare, a world of brothers and sisters to appreciate and serve, not to exploit or dominate. Not a world to defend, but a world to embrace.
Consecrate yourselves, dear young people, to the civilization of love, whose shoots you have found in so many examples of gratuity and which transfigures - after the image of Christ- countless artisans of peace who still today serve life in the most tragic scenarios of death.
Unite the best energies of your magnificent humanity - studies, skills, work, friendships, love, prayer - updating in various ways the vision of Francis.
I imagine that the prayer often attributed to him, a text from the last century, is dear to you:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me bring love;
where there is offense, let me bring pardon;
where there is discord, let me bring union;
where there is error, let me bring truth;
where there is doubt, let me bring faith;
where there is despair, let me bring hope;
where there is darkness, let me bring light;
where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
Here is “where” to go! Go! But above all, here is “how” to go:
Lord, grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in forgetting ourselves that we find ourselves;
it is in forgiving that we are forgiven;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Dear friends, may these days in Assisi remain engraved in your memory and may the return home, to the various countries of Europe toward which you will travel, be like the descent of Peter, James, and John from the high mountain of the Transfiguration.
A return full of reflection, open to the future, and committed to Jesus Christ. He trusts in you, counts on you, and remains always with you.
