World Youth Day Lisbon 2023

The play celebrates the meeting of Mary, the mother of Jesus, with Saint Elizabeth. The embrace represents the shared joy between the two figures at the moment they meet. The visitation, as a personal and spiritual journey, and also the human and hurried desire to enter into communion, is the culmination of several consecrated moments and individual commitments that led them there. It is the moment that begins with the angel's annunciation, but which is completed and consummated in the unanimous joy experienced in the house of Zechariah and Elizabeth. In their mantles, we pray the various scenes that precede and prepare the meeting of the Mother of Jesus with her cousin, and which for us should be a guiding symbol in the time preceding the arrival and presence of Pope Francis at World Youth Day Lisbon 2023. They are no longer disjointed figures, but a single embrace in which we discover the first two women devoted to Jesus, who were already expected. Elizabeth, who directs her gaze to Jesus, a sign of her obedience, veneration, and surrender; And Mary, gazing at the sky with her eyes, is a sign of her consecration, pure sacrifice, and total fidelity.