CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy (OSV News) — When Jack Lebon, 15, returns to his Texas high school in the fall, he will be able to share a summer experience few can match: a handshake with Pope Leo XIV.
He is one of 140 young missionaries from across the globe taking part in Regnum Christi’s various faith formation programs currently underway in Rome who received a special shoutout from Pope Leo in Castel Gandolfo this week, capping off a summer of prayer and evangelization in Italy.
“We’re all … on the same mission of just trying to spread the Gospel, trying to evangelize and love people through Christ, and encounter Christ in them and have them encounter Christ in us,” Kristin Velasquez, 27, told OSV News after the missionaries’ encounter with the pope at the end of his Angelus address July 19 at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.
‘An amazing experience’
For Velasquez, who is participating in Regnum Christi’s International Formators Course, one of the experience’s highlights has been taking part in street evangelization, inviting tourists and passersby on one of Rome’s busiest pedestrian streets to come into a church to write down their prayer requests and experience Eucharistic adoration.
“It’s just an amazing experience to get people to encounter Jesus Christ, who is real and who is alive. And we love him,” Velasquez said.
“We had a choir inside for adoration. We had people on the street playing soccer for the kids,” she told OSV News. “We had other people on the opposite side of the street inviting them to come into the church if they’ve never been inside, never had prayer, guiding them all the way down to the altar with a candle and teaching them how to pray for the first time.”
Alongside Velasquez in the formators course is Sara Mora, 25, who described a sense of belonging among the group, whose members hail from Germany, Poland, Mexico, the Philippines and other countries. “I love that we get to all be like one Catholic family,” she said, “and seeing all the youth just so on fire for the pope and him being so welcoming.”
Both women had previously served as missionaries with Regnum Christi — Mora in Colombia and Velasquez in Brazil — before joining this summer’s formation program in Rome.
“The formation is amazing because you have the contemplative side of prayer as well as going out and evangelizing,” Mora said. “We’re all here doing different things, but all united for the same cause, which is to make disciples and just really love others as Jesus did.”
‘The Catholic center of the world’
For the Angelus in Castel Gandolfo, the young adults joined participants from several other Regnum Christi summer programs, including the Catholic Worldview Fellowship, a monthlong study-abroad program for university students, and the ECYD Mission Corps, an international missionary exchange for high school students.
Among the ECYD missionaries were Lebon and his classmate Brady Morgan, both students at The Highlands School in Irving, Texas, who are spending the summer serving at Catholic camps across Italy.
“We started in Milan and now we’re in Rome, and then we go to Sicily,” Lebon said. “We just help out at summer camps spreading the word.”
“Just serving the community through just daily acts and just going out and spreading the word of the Lord and just through acts of service,” added Morgan, also 15.
For Lebon and Morgan, the summer’s high point came during that brief but personal encounter with the pope at Castel Gandolfo.
“It was absolutely amazing. I shook his hand,” Lebon said. Morgan, likewise, was thrilled that the pope blessed his rosary.
Lebon said the summer experience has strengthened his own faith.
“It’s just such an incredible experience to be out here in Rome, the Catholic center of the world,” he said. “It has honestly just made me believe more about the faith and just shown how truly amazing it is.”
Courtney Mares is Vatican editor for OSV News. Follow her on X @catholicourtney.
