Vatican endorses Journey to Redemption 2033, a global youth renewal movement

The Vatican is lending its support to the Journey to Redemption 2033, a youth movement focused on spiritual renewal and culminating in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to commemorate the Redemption.

The Vatican has endorsed the Journey to Redemption 2033 project being promoted by the Spanish Bishops’ Conference as well as other episcopal conferences around the world.

The initiative began by encouraging young Christians from across Europe to open up a pathway to faith and hope for a new European generation in preparation for the Jubilee of Redemption, which will be celebrated in 2033.

The first stage of the project began in 2025 in Rome with the Jubilee of Hope. The project’s next destinations are Santiago de Compostela in 2027 and Jerusalem in 2033, coinciding with the 2,000th anniversary of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ.

Last week, the bishop of Palencia, Mikel Garciandía, held an intensive series of meetings at the Vatican with various dicasteries of the Roman Curia to advance the initiative worldwide.

Garciandía’s goal is ambitious: “We want it to be the project that has received the most support from young people in history,” he said.

In an interview with ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News, the bishop said that even at the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family, and Life, he was told: “This has never been done before: to have a project that has to be simultaneously coordinated across five dicasteries and that is so transversal and so international.”

The project was officially launched on Aug. 1, 2025, with the proclamation of its manifesto during a special event held at Santa Maria in Trastevere Church in Rome as part of the Jubilee of Young People.

However, the decisive moment came on Jan. 21, after the pope’s general audience. “The pope showed us the way and entrusted us with structuring this work with young people,” he explained.

Garciandía said the pontiff was already aware of the impact of the manifesto, which he had received in a private audience at the Apostolic Palace on Oct. 3, 2025: “This manifesto had received significant media attention in the first half of July, with practically a quarter of a million people and institutions adhering to it.”

“The work of these past few days was structured around three main themes: family and life, youth and culture, and new evangelization, which are three of the elements of this project,” said Garciandía, who was formerly rector of St. Michael of Aralar Shrine.

This shrine dedicated to the Archangel Michael is part of a network from which the initiative originally arose and which was later adopted by the Spanish Bishops’ Conference.

The prelate emphasized that this is a process that has just entered a decisive phase: “Now we are, so to speak, structuring the work for the next eight years.”

The organizers want it to be the manifesto that receives the most support from young people in history. In this regard, Garciandía provided some revealing figures: “236,000 young people signed the manifesto in less than two weeks in July.” He added that “100,000 young people from Canada who are going to hold a conference in 2027 have already requested that Journey to Redemption be included.”

The global dimension is one of the keys to the Journey to Redemption, as about 196 bishops’ conferences throughout the world have been contacted about the effort.

The idea is to restore to the pilgrimage experience the spiritual content that, throughout the centuries, filled the soul, heart, and mind of those who traveled the roads to Santiago de Compostelo, Rome, and Jerusalem.

Garciandía noted that the pope himself identified with the youthful spirit of the project: “At the audience, the pope told us, ‘I am young, and I want to sign the manifesto.’ And he signed the manifesto.”

Although the journey’s final stage is in Jerusalem to commemorate the 2,000th anniversary of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, the bishop emphasized that “this project aims to have not an end in itself but a horizon of redemption.”

An unprecedented opportunity

The Spanish bishop placed this project in the context of a profound cultural transformation among young people.

“Most of them haven’t even heard of Jesus,” he said, highlighting an unprecedented opportunity: “We have a generation of young people who live on social media and who don’t have any particular prejudices either for or against the Church.”

He noted that for the past 15 years, youth have been “highly ideologized.”

In this context, he said the emergence of social media has been positive because “it has caused the transmission of ideologies and philosophies, even atheism itself, to collapse.”

For the Church, he emphasized, this opens a new missionary horizon “because we have young people who have nothing against us”; hence, the value he attributes to pilgrimages and shrines, which he calls “opportunities where many people are going out into the streets and searching for something that they are thirsting for.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.

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