Leo XIV to West Africa's youth: “You are not a sacrificed generation”

By video message, Leo XIV addressed the first West African Youth Day, gathered from 7 to 12 September 2026 at the initiative of the region's episcopal conferences, which say they have placed the young at the heart of their pastoral priorities. To the assembled young people he declared: “You are not a sacrificed generation, as many may think. In the Church-Family of God, you are God's today, the today of the Church.” He called them to be “builders of bridges between peoples, cultures and religions” and “witnesses of love, justice and peace.”

That youth is a treasure, tradition has never denied; it orders it. But it measures that treasure by a single standard: the profession of the true faith and perseverance in it. The baptised is not made to build bridges between religions, for there is but one Church, outside of which no one is saved, and one way to the Father, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Between peoples and cultures charity stretches bridges; between revealed truth and the cults that ignore it, it knows but one road, conversion.

To encourage the young to hope and to guard them from doubt is a good work, provided this hope has Heaven for its object and not an earthly future. But to tell them they are “God's today” without first telling them again that they are made for eternity, and to send them to build bridges “between religions” rather than carry the faith to the nations, is to invert the end and the means. The Church of West Africa did not grow by bridges thrown toward other cults, but by the blood of its martyrs and the preaching of the only name given to men whereby they must be saved.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the article “I believe in the holy Catholic Church” and the unity of the Church; Pius XI, encyclical Mortalium animos (1928); Acts of the Apostles IV, 12 (Douay-Rheims): “Neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved.”