“World Youth Day is an invitation to all the young people of the world to experience God,” Bishop Américo Aguiar told ACI Digital, clarifying comments he made in a July 6 interview.

The auxiliary bishop of Lisbon and new president of the WYD Lisbon 2023 Foundation, who Pope Francis recently recently named a cardinal, told ACI Digital that his comments were made in the context of a longer interview in which he was quoted as saying, “We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that at all.” …

For the cardinal-designate, the goal is to enable each young person to say: “‘I think differently, I feel differently, I organize my life in a different way, but we are brothers and we go together to build the future.’ This is the main message of this encounter with the living Christ that the pope wants to provide to young people.”

“We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that at all,” Aguiar continued. “We want it to be normal for a young Catholic Christian to say and bear witness to who he is or for a young Muslim, Jew, or of another religion to also have no problem saying who he is and bearing witness to it, and for a young person who has no religion to feel welcome and to perhaps not feel strange for thinking in a different way.”

[Ahem. We can be welcoming while still fulfilling the Great Commission. We want people to be free to express themselves, but we should remember that the purpose of the Church is to bring people to Christ, not to a generic sense of brotherhood. It’s the difference between being in the world and being of the world. If the cardinals, bishops, priests, and laity aren’t bringing people to Christ, then why have a church at all? — Ed]