Three messages from Leo XIV to volunteers

A few minutes after 10 a.m., Pope Leo XIV made his appearance at the Ifema pavilion where the 12,000 volunteers who had accompanied him during the previous three days of events in Madrid were gathered.

After the shouts of emotion and the popemobile ride through the grounds while the hymn of the visit, «Alzo la mirada», resounded, the Pope listened to the testimony of two volunteers and was dismissed with a few words of thanks from Cardinal Cobo.

The Pope's words of thanks to the volunteers underscored three ideas:

1. The Pope's gratitude

Leo XIV opened his speech by distinguishing the volunteers with a singular thanks, because their service was not a professional task but an act of faith: «You volunteers deserve a very special ‘thank you’, because you have offered your presence and your service, and you have done it out of love for the Lord, the Church and the Pope. Thank you with all my heart!».

2. The yeast of gratuitousness

Faced with the culture of profit and growth measured only in economic terms, the Pope proposed the Gospel logic of integral human growth, quoting Luke: «Christians are called to bring to the world the leaven of gratuitousness (...) It is the logic of the Gospel, which says: ‘If you do good only to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what merit do you have?’».

With an evocation of the Acts of the Apostles, the Pope revealed the ultimate root of gratuitous service: «This is the secret: the love of God, which moves the sun and the stars, and moves the hearts of those who have encountered the Lord Jesus, who said: ‘There is more joy in giving than in receiving’».

3. The Gospel as a way of life

Leo XIV stressed that the Christian mission is transmitted more by the way of living than by doctrinal preaching. Volunteering is that visible incarnation of the Kingdom: «Jesus Christ came to bring into the world the leaven of the Kingdom of Heaven... through a way of life, a way of thinking and behaving that is that of the Gospel».

At the end of the ceremony, the Pope blessed the first stones of eighteen parishes to be built in the three dioceses of Madrid and, finally, presented the Archdiocese of Madrid with a chalice as a souvenir of his visit.