Thirty-two years after Manila, World Youth Day (WYD) will return to Asia. Seoul will in fact host the event in 2027, while Rome (Italy) will organise the jubilee of young people in August 2025.
Pope Francis made the announcement this morning in Lisbon at the end of the final Mass of the great gathering that saw a million young people from all over the world travel to Portugal. “From the western edge of Europe to Far East Asia,” said the pontiff, is “a beautiful sign of universality”.
As a venue for WYD, Seoul was neither unexpected nor a certainty. Last October, AsiaNews had spoken to the recently appointed Archbishop Peter Chung Soon-taick of Seoul, OCD, on the sidelines of the General Conference of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC).
On that occasion, the young prelate had expressed the desire of the Korean Church to host the next WYD, hoping that it could be a “turning point” for the youth ministry in one of the many Asian countries facing demographic winter as a result of sub-replacement fertility levels.
South Korea now has the lowest fertility rate in the world, namely 0.78 children per woman in 2022, just 249,000 births in a nation of 51 million.