Who is the young Portuguese who will speak before Pope Francis in the cathedral?

Mass doesn’t have to be boring. Diogo Costa Gomes is convinced of this and, at 25, he has this argument in his pocket: he has attended, participated in or organized hundreds of Eucharists. It’s not that he’s pretentious, it’s just a point he wants to make. “You can have a drink, go out dancing with your friends and be Catholic. Being a believer doesn’t make you less cool. On the contrary, it can be very rock’n’roll.”

The day he saw the Pope for the last time, he woke up like this, in the middle of a party. “It was World Youth Day in Lisbon. I was representing Luxembourg, but I’m also Portuguese. I speak the language, it’s my culture, I was at home. The last night, we all slept outside, on the field where Pope Francis was going to address young people the next day. There were hundreds of thousands of us. We woke up with a Portuguese priest (Editor’s note: Guilherme Peixoto, a priest from Póvoa de Varzim who became a viral DJ on the internet) in front of a mixing desk, mixing techno and religious music. It was incredible,” he recalls, and his eyes also smile at the memory of that time.

Diogo was chosen by Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich to welcome the pontiff to Luxembourg. This Thursday, when Francis meets the Christian community in Notre-Dame Cathedral, he will have the honor of addressing the pope first. After the monarchy and political power, it is his voice that we will hear.

In addition to Diogo, the organization is planning two other speeches from the Catholic community. One will be given by Christine Busshardt, vice-president of the Diocesan Pastoral Council. She will talk about pastoral life in the Archdiocese of Luxembourg. The other conference will be given by Sister Perpétua, a nun who spent ten years in the Grand Duchy and who has extensive experience in divestment. Of Portuguese origin, she will present a vision of this laboratory that is Luxembourg, multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual. Composed of several ways of speaking, too.

Diogo Gomes Costa is nervous. This is the third time he will meet the Pope (he went to see him in Poland in 2016, during another edition of the World Youth Day), but this time, it is face-to-face, eye to eye. To talk about youth and modernity, what he defends for his Church. The pressure is high. “The only thing that reassures me,” explains the boy, “is that the Pope is a man ahead of his time.” For this young man, as for many people (of all ages), Francis is a breath of fresh air in the Church. Even though he is 87 years old, he is a very rock’n’roll man.

Mysteries of Faith

In a recent interview with Contact and to Luxembourger WortCardinal Hollerich, head of the Luxembourg Church, admitted that it was difficult for the Church to keep young people in its ranks. In the same conversation, he praised the spirituality of the Portuguese descendants, who are more open to questions of faith. Diogo agrees with this point of view. “There are many Portuguese in our group of altar servers. When we went to the World Youth Day, there were also many Portuguese,” he explains. Cardinal Hollerich is the first to admit it: the Portuguese-speaking community is the foundation of Catholicism in Luxembourg.

It was at the beginning of June that he received “the invitation to welcome the Pope to Notre Dame Cathedral” (that is precisely what he was told on the other end of the line). Although handpicked by the cardinal, the voice that spoke to him was that of the Vicar General of Luxembourg, on behalf of Cardinal Hollerich. “It was a weekday and I had just come home from work. I kept quiet for a few hours and did not tell my family. We had dinner together, as I do every day, and only then did I go into the living room to tell them what had happened,” he recalls. His parents and sister immediately burst into joy and he fell silent, not knowing what to say. “I am a reserved person,” he admits.

It took a lot of thought to write the speech he wanted to give. The document had to be sent to Rome for official approval and, since August, it has been refined: the text is ready. “I will speak on behalf of young people and I will talk about the World Youth Day in Lisbon, which was an extraordinary moment for all those who were there,” he reveals. “It changed me profoundly.”

Diogo measures his words carefully when he says this. He is not one of those Catholics who one day had a revelation or an epiphany. His encounter with God has developed over the years; after all, he has been involved in the structures of the Church for as long as he can remember. He shows us a photo from when he was not old enough to go to school: he is participating in the procession of the dances of Echternach, the cult of Saint Willibrord classified as an intangible heritage of humanity by UNESCO. Clutching a handkerchief, he jumps left and right, joy on his face.

He grew up here, in Echternach, and this is where he wants to live his whole life. But his roots are in Póvoa do Lanhoso, in the district of Braga, and for him, this is anything but a coincidence. “Most of the Portuguese in Echternach come from Minho, which is probably the region of Portugal where religious activity is most marked. But here, where I live, the same thing is happening on a Luxembourg scale,” he explains. As if Echternach, which is also the oldest city in the country, were an informal capital of Catholicism in the Grand Duchy.

He does not know the reasons for this unlikely connection, but he can guarantee one thing: he felt it up close. Not only on family holidays, when he saw people going in procession to the monastery of Saint Benedict of the Open Door. In the summer of 2003, when he went on the journeys with the Pope, the Luxembourg delegation camped for a week in Cabeceiras de Basto. What happened that week was something magical, says Diogo Gomes Costa. “God was there, that’s for sure.”

The week the group spent in Cabeceiras de Basto was simply extraordinary, says Diogo. They went on excursions to see the region’s monuments, hikes in the mountains and Bible discussion groups with the Portuguese who hosted them. “We stayed in a school gym and the relationship we formed with the youth group there was incredible. We went everywhere with them, we led mass together, we filled the streets of all those villages with our joy. On the last day, they even had a fireworks display to say goodbye to us,” he recalls, unable to hide his emotion. A few days later, they would meet up with the same group in the Portuguese capital, but that last night in Cabeceiras was marked by many hugs, many tears and a taste of the nostalgia that everyone was about to feel.

Then they headed to the mouth of the Tagus. They stayed in another gymnasium, in a school in Montelavar, in the Sintra countryside. They were going to visit Lisbon, to meet up with the friends they had made the week before, but the expectation of seeing the pope was growing in their chests. In the early morning, when Francis appeared, they slept outside with hundreds of thousands of young people from all over the world. It was then that the Holy Father appeared and said something that Diogo Gomes Costa will never forget.

“He made us repeat several times that in the Church there is room for everyone,” he recalls today in Echternach. He identifies with those words and that is why he says Francis is special. “The Church must make room for people of all ethnicities, all beliefs and all sexual orientations. It must be a refuge, a place of welcome. I think that is what the pope truly believes, and that is what I believe too,” he says without blinking. “So don’t tell me that being Catholic is not cool.”

The trip to Portugal had a profound effect on him. “I have a girlfriend, so it doesn’t occur to me to give myself to the priesthood. But I know that religion will always be part of my life,” he says.

He is among us

As he walks through the streets of Echternach, Diogo greets passers-by. It’s not a big city, which partly explains the phenomenon. But everyone seems to know the kid, who was an altar boy at the basilica for years, and who will now speak to the Pope. There’s also another side to him that earns him a few nods. It’s the fact that he’s passionate about football. And a Benfica fan.

He has played left-back for the local team since he was a child. He only gave up football during his university studies. “I didn’t have time for everything, it was football or choirboys,” and when he could, he gave priority to the latter. In the meantime, he studied architecture: a bachelor’s degree in Paris, a master’s degree in Belval. The idea of ​​building bridges captivates him; it is also an ecclesiastical lesson. “I am currently working on a project that I really like: the construction of a secondary school in Ettelbruck. It is a valuable contribution to the community,” he says.

Next Thursday, Diogo Gomes Costa will meet Pope Francis for the third time, look him in the eye and tell him that the Church is also young people. Even on difficult days, even when his generation seems to be moving away from the temple, he wants to believe that Catholicism has its irreverence and that it is not because he is an altar boy that he is less cool than the others. And he already knows one thing… It is not only the man in white that he will meet this Thursday at Notre Dame Cathedral. There will also be God.

This article was originally published on the website of Contact.

Adaptation: Mélodie Mouzon