The Pope in the Laudato village yes on May 29th (Ansa)
Castel Gandolfo is preparing to welcome Pope Leone XIV that will spend, starting from Sunday 6 July Two weeks of vacation. The arrival is expected in the afternoon, after the Angelus recitation to be held a St. Peter’s Square. For twelve years the Pope has been missing from the town of the castles.
Prevost will reside at Villa Barberini, In the Borgo Laudato yesthus allowing tourists to continue visiting the museum wanted by Pope Francis to open the beauties of the Pontifical Villa to the whole world. If you want it will also be able to do sports, given the presence of tennis courts and a swimming pool that had been built for Wojtyla. During the 14 days, the Pontiff will celebrate on Sunday 13, at 10 am, the mass in the Pontifical parish of San Tommaso da Villanova.
At 12 he will then recite the Angelus prayer in Piazza della Libertà, in front of the Apostolic Palace. Sunday 20 July, at 9.30 am, a new mass in the Cathedral of Albano, the seat of which the then cardinal Prevost was the owner before the election to the pontificate. On the same day, at 12, the pontiff will recite the Angelus again in Piazza della Libertà; In the afternoon he will return to the Vatican.
Throughout the month of July all the private hearings will remain suspended, and the general hearings that will resume only on Wednesday 30 July. In the following days the great Jubilee of the young people will be held, which will culminate on Sunday 3 August with the vigil and putting in Tor Vergata. Leone XIV has already gone twice (29 May and 3 July) in the town of the Castelli Romani to visit the Borgo Laudato Si ‘, the project created by Pope Francis In 2023 in the area of the pontifical villas as a training space on the themes of the common house, an example of that “full ecology” at the base of the encyclical published ten years ago.
On this occasion, Leone XIV had also gone to the Apostolic Palace, That since 2016 Pope Francis had transformed into a museum pole open to visitors. Just in the Borgo Laudato Si ‘, Pope Leone will celebrate the first mass for the custody of creation, next July 9th.
The story of Castel Gandolfo has been linked to the times of the Popes since the time of Urban VIII, the first who went to stay in 1600. Then the popes have gladly chosen this corner of Lazio to take a few days of rest. Pope Francis, however, who had never had holidays in his life, kept his habit of spending his holidays, usually in July, at home and did not move from Santa Marta.
He went to Castel Gandolfo only for the historic meeting with Benedict XIV on March 23, 2013, for a sort of “handover” and returned there on August 15 of the same year to celebrate the mass for the festival of the Assumption.
The return of Leone XIV is highly awaited. “A very important symbolic moment”, as the mayor Alberto De Angelis has recently pointed out, remembering when Pope Wojtyla, who renamed this place “the Vatican second”, He was walking from the building to go to celebrate Mass in the parish of San Tommaso.
Even the oldest residents remember those years, when “you got up at 4 in the morning to be in the front row and make our children bless the Pope”. “We wait for her with great enthusiasm,” the parish priest told Vatican media, Don Tadeusz Rozmusremembering that that San Tommaso da Villanova was an Augustinian, just like Pope Prevost.
Someone older also remembers sad moments, such as the death of Paul VI, died here on August 6, 1978, as had happened twenty years earlier also for Pius XII.
