“Hey Hey Baby (Hu Ha), I Wanna Know If You’ll Be My Girl”. A catchphrase of 2016 that the other evening came strong and clear from outside and entered powerful in the living room. To sing it a hundred boys, guests of the parish near house, in Rome for the jubilee of young people. The same scene – with different songs – has been repeated for days in many neighborhoods of the capital, full of under 30 pilgrims from all over the world.

On the streets, in the squares, under the subway, the images are always those: groups of boys who sing and dance. The portrait of an enthusiasm that adulthood takes away. Beautiful to see and also to breathe for those in front of so much joy. But is there only this?

The social jubilee

The program is dense. Meetings, celebrations, moments of prayer, from San Pietro to the Circus Maximus, up to the most awaited moment, the meeting with the Pope, the vigil and the Mass – on 2 and 3 August – in Tor Vergata, in the same esplanade which in 2000 hosted an equally lively but not social world of the youth day. And this is what makes the difference, those smartphones always focused on the celebration at all costs to be shared on Instagram and Tiktok, as if the greatest experience of faith had turned – 25 years later – into a pop rock festival, with more stages to the assets.

Sisters that dance the village people, priests who raise stadium choirs or do the DJs, boys and girls who jump as if they were at a concert of the AC/DC. Scrolling the social networks, we come across scenes that touch almost the collective hysteria, completely disconnected from the Fil Rouge that brings about a million young faithful to Rome, if it were not for the Copies of the Reel, who at least in words bring attention to the Jubilee. “These guys can celebrate,” reads the infinite string of video. And surely they know how to do it, but the obsession with showing it the ruin a little, the bare of spontaneity. Online everything becomes a show, as if it were a huge Cristoteca in which to skid the world a sort of ‘Catholic fun’ which has a week of time to show off.

And this is the greatest ‘sin’, to want to end in order to standardize a social narrative that does not need both content and contentment and perfection to necessarily always have to demonstrate. The young pilgrims who sing and dance are beautiful. Beautiful. Behind those festive scenes, however, there is much more that from a phone you can’t see.