Pope Leo XIV Urges Argentine Youth to Reject 'Idols' and Follow the Saints

On Tuesday night, an intersection of grand boulevards in Buenos Aires, the Monumento de los Españoles, filled with an estimated 1 million people. They had come for a youth vigil led by Pope Leo XIV, in the hometown of his predecessor, Pope Francis. Overflow crowds watched on large screens in a nearby park.

The night before, the same spot drew an estimated 2.5 million people to Leo's main Mass in Buenos Aires, a record for his still-young pontificate. Earlier on Tuesday, the Vatican estimated, 650,000 people attended a Mass in the central city of Córdoba.

At the vigil, Leo urged young Argentines to stand firm against what he called the idols of our time: success at any cost, money, drugs, pornography, and an obsession with appearances, popularity or pleasure. "Do not bow down before anything that cannot give you life," he said. "And if you have ever fallen, get back up." As in Córdoba, he pointed them toward the saints. "We are all called to holiness," he said, adding that the saints and blesseds have finished their mission on Earth and that it is now the turn of the living to follow their example.

Emilia Caroti, who watched from the park, described a generation short on motivation, marked by what it sees of the past and by the little hope there is for the future. She hoped the pope could help renew young people's faith in themselves.

The Córdoba Mass was held on the grounds of the Argentine Aircraft Factory, a plant run by the air force for much of the 20th century. It built the attack planes the military first used in late 1975 against leftist guerrillas, a campaign that preceded the state terror of the 1976-1983 dictatorship. Human rights groups estimate that around 30,000 people were killed or disappeared in those years.

Afterward, Leo met privately with 20 people chosen by the archbishop, including a rural worker, a soup kitchen organizer and a human trafficking survivor. Among them was Alba Camargo, whose father, stepmother, aunt and uncle all disappeared under the dictatorship. She was herself detained by security forces in 1976, at age 13; she is now 64. She told the pope she spoke for relatives still searching for victims' remains at La Perla, a former clandestine detention center outside Córdoba, and gave him a folder with photos of the excavations and the names of those identified so far. Two weeks earlier, forensic anthropologists had identified the remains of nine missing people from La Perla. Camargo said Leo nodded, took her hand and blessed Franciscan crosses she had brought. She called the meeting a gesture showing that he sees them, and said many in the group were too moved to speak.

She hopes the meeting will bring change. President Javier Milei's government has gutted funding for dictatorship memorial sites and for groups searching for the disappeared, and has promoted a revisionist account casting the military's crimes as little more than excesses in a war against guerrillas. "It's exhausting," Camargo told The Associated Press, to be told constantly that what you have lived is not true.

Leo has addressed that history only in passing. In his first speech on Sunday, to Milei and government authorities, he spoke of reasons for gratitude and painful memories, and said each generation must decide what to preserve and confront past injustices. Those remarks were seen as a reference to the dictatorship.

His sharper social appeals from the first two days were still reverberating in Buenos Aires. Four senators from Milei's party began preparing to take up a stalled bill banning online gambling ads, which Milei has opposed and the church has backed as a way to protect children. Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno, defending the government against readings of the pope's words as a rebuke of austerity, said the message to protect the vulnerable was meant for everyone. He also conceded it challenges the entire political class and exposes what the country lacks. Whether the gambling bill moves forward is the next measurable sign.