(ZENIT News / Rome, 03.08.2025) – Perhaps the best-known fact about the Jubilee of Young People is the number of participants: one million. The Prefect of Rome, Lamberto Giannini, confirmed to the press — which included ZENIT — that at Torvergata — the location where the Prayer Vigil was held on Saturday evening, August 2, and the Mass on Sunday, August 3 –, there were just over one million people. With this figure, the Jubilee of Youth was the most largest event of the 2025 Jubilee. However, there are other surprising facts, which are given below:
1. The first to wake up on Sunday morning, August 3, were the Koreans (around 4 a.m.). Around 5 a.m., other groups woke up. At night, a light drizzle meant that most of the million young people gathered had to figure out how to avoid getting wet.
2. The million young people present came from 146 different countries.
3. Paramedics assisted 1,200 people, most of whom were treated at one of the field hospitals set up in Torvergata. The reasons for their interventions were the heat, fever, bruises, sunstroke, and anxiety.
4. The concluding Mass of the Jubilee of Youth was celebrated by 450 Bishops and 7,000 priests.
5. In his homily, Pope Leo XIV quoted Pope Francis and Saint John Paul II. He also made reference to Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati, popular Blesseds among young people, whom the Holy Father will canonize on September 7.
6. At the end of the Mass, during the Angelus, Pope Leo XIV remembered the young people of Ukraine and Gaza.
7. The Pontiff invited all those present to attend the next World Youth Day, which will take place in Seoul, Korea, from August 3-8, 2027.
8. After the closing Mass, the Rome metro offered train service every three minutes, according to Roberto Massucci of the Questura [Police headquarters] of Rome.
9. Among the participants in the Jubilee weekend events were young people of a juvenile correctional facility, the Ministry of Justice confirmed to ZENIT.
10. In Rome’s Circus Maximus, a place equipped with confessionals, there were 28,000 confessions and 1,000 priests hearing those confessions. Although it was initially planned that the priests should leave at 6:00 p.m., most did not leave until 8:00 p.m.
11, Two young people died during the Jubilee: Pascale Rafic from Egypt and Maria Cobo Vergara from Spain. Pascale died in Rome of a heart attack while going to the parish that would host her group. Maria, who was already suffering from an illness, died while en route from Madrid to Rome.
12. This celebration required two years of preparation.
13. 20,000 people were involved in the preparations for the Youth Jubilee.
14. According to Lamberto Giannini, Prefect of Rome, the 2025 Youth Jubilee was the largest event in the Italian capital in the last 25 years, even surpassing the funerals of Benedict XVI and Pope Francis himself. «I think I can say that in the last 25 years this has been the most significant and impressive event in Italy and perhaps even in Europe.»
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