Sun poured down on St Peter's Basilica, lighting up a huge tapestry depicting the boy saint's purposeful face like a Leonardo canvas.
Choral music wafted across a square replete with cardinals and bishops, yet we might have been at a Bruno Mars gig, given the proportion of excitable, selfie-taking millennials in the vast crowd.
Five months ago when I last gazed down from these colonnades at the funeral of Pope Leo XIV's predecessor, Francis, mournfulness and uncertainty hung heavy, for the Catholic church had not only lost its much-loved figurehead. It seemed in danger of losing its very compass.
Yesterday this same square was an oasis of unbridled joy in a troubled world.
For the adolescent depicted on the tapestry – London-born Carlo Acutis – had injected the estimated 80,000 crowd, and hundreds of millions more watching on the TV and internet, with an adrenaline shot of neat optimism.
