Questioning the pope: How NCYC prepares to host a papal Q&A

Leaders of the National Catholic Youth Conference made a longshot request last month: Would Pope Leo XIV be willing to share a 10 minute, pre-recorded address with attendees at their November gathering?

Ten days later, they received a completely unexpected response from the Vatican: Yes. The pope would do that.

Kind of.

Actually, the Vatican requested two changes: First, that 10 minutes would be too short.

Second, that the pope did not want to do a pre-recorded session — he wanted it to be live. The Vatican proposed a 30-45 minute “virtual encounter” between Leo and the young people attending the conference.

The encounter would include a brief address by the pope and an opportunity for the young people to ask the pontiff questions.

When they received the reply, leaders at the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, which hosts NCYC, were shocked.

“We are beyond excited and are humbled that Leo has selected to do this with the young people at NCYC,” Maureen Gross, NFCYM’s director of meetings and events, told The Pillar.

“The fact that in his early days of leadership, that this was a priority is good news for Catholics everywhere.”

“I hope that it will be a real shot in the arm for young people, who I think are always longing for holiness,” Gross added.

NCYC leaders reached out to the Vatican after their episcopal advisor, Archbishop Nelson Perez of Philadelphia, suggested that they ask the Vatican if the pope would be available to address the participants.

“Archbishop Perez encouraged us to reach out and see if the Holy Father would be willing to do a very brief live stream with the young people at NCYC,” Gross said.

“Archbishop Perez has really been our champion through this. So in those conversations, the Vatican office had said that they didn't think that the 10 minutes we proposed was long enough.”

The National Catholic Youth Conference is an annual conference for high school students. This year, it takes place November 20-22 at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana. To date, 10,000 high school students have registered for the conference.

Leo’s address will be held on Nov. 21, the conference’s first full day.

With the headline event scheduled, organizers are turning their attention to the many logistics surrounding the 45-minute-livestream, which will cross six time zones, and 4,845 miles.

So will high school kids have free range for papal questions? Will they line up behind a microphone, town hall style? Will young people ask the pope about Tik Tok trends and his favorite pizza? Will they ask more substantive questions?

Or will they deliver pre-drafted questions, written and approved by the Vatican and event organizers?

Event planning is in the early stages, organizers say, and they’re just starting to hash out how the program will flow — and how questions will be formulated for Pope Leo.

They’ll meet in early September with Vatican sostituto Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra and other Vatican officials about the event's logistics.

“At our meeting in Rome next month, some more details will be ironed out,” Gross said. “There's the general logistics of how the Holy Father would do any kind of exchange via technology, but then we also have to think through how we will come up with questions and what we want it to look like on our end.”

But, they have started to discuss what the question-and-answer session could look like.

When she first learned of the pope’s availability, Gross said, she asked her own teenage children what questions they would ask the pope, to generate samples of what might come up.

But while they helped, Gross’ own children will not likely be asking the pope questions.

NCYC will aim to select questioners via a general lottery, drawing from all registered attendees.

But depending on how that turns out, organizers might look to balance things some.

“We do not have any specific quota that we need to meet such as six girls and six boys or anything like that,” Gross said. “We are looking to make sure that we get representation that is geographically diverse, that there is some gender balance, that there is some recognition of the diversity of cultures and ethnicity of the NCYC participants.”

“But our first attempt will be a general lottery.”

Organizers have not settled on how many questions will be asked but said that between 7 and 14 students will be selected.

With the students selected, organizers will then help students draft and revise their questions to ensure there are no repeat questions and that leaders regard them as appropriate and meaningful.

“We would like to hear the questions from the young people,” Gross said. “In terms of vetting, we do not want five kids in a row to ask the same question, so we will workshop the questions with the students—- making sure that they are not asking the same thing over and over, and that we are not just asking the pope whether he likes Chicago style or Brooklyn style pizz.”

The pope requested that the event be structured as a dialogue, so organizers do not want students to ask the pope their questions in rapid succession.

“We will work with them more on the dialogue part than on the initial question,” Gross said. “We want to teach them how to listen for the answer and how to ask a follow up question. We want them to be answering and conversing with the pope. You can not just have the next question queued up, because that is not a dialogue.”

The conversation will be guided by a facilitator — Catholic speaker and radio host Katie McGrady.

“We have a facilitator for the conversation so if we were to move through the questions quickly, there is a facilitator there who can help draw out the conversation,” Gross said. “But I imagine that the Holy Father is a gifted conversationalist and would be able to fill in any gaps that might exist.”

Before answering questions, Leo will give a brief address to the conference attendees. Organizers have asked him to speak about the morning session’s topic — sacrament of Confirmation.

“When we sent the original invitation, we gave the Vatican the theme for our event which is ‘I Am’ — and how we are exploring it, which is through the sacraments,” Gross said.

“I expect that his comments will be somewhat grounded in that sacramental lens centered around questions like: what does confirmation mean? And what does it mean when we are confirmed in the Spirit? How does that affect the way we interact with the secular world?”

After his question, Leo will impart a blessing upon those gathered.

Ensuring a smooth, high-quality livestream can be tricky, NCYC told The Pillar.

The organization partnered with EWTN to coordinate the livestream between participants and the pope. In exchange for facilitating, EWTN will distribute the dialogue on its platforms.

During the event, EWTN will transmit the conference livestream to a studio in Rome. That studio will receive a live feed of the pope from the Vatican communications department, which will be relayed back to the conference.

However, organizers are in the early stages of coordinating the technology.

“Our production company is meeting with EWTN and me to talk through all of those questions such as: ‘Where are you going to draw power? Where are we going to do the setup? Where does their production team operate from?’ All of that kind of stuff we are in the early stages. and we are talking to the Vatican about what the technology will require from their side,” Gross said.

“There is a lot to think about.”

As for Leo, he will be recording in a small space in the Vatican, reserved for recording video messages, such as the one shared at the Chicago Mass held to celebrate the hometown pope’s election, this past June at Rate’s field. The pope will have a monitor where he can see the conference's participants and engage with their questions.

This will be the first time a pope has done a live question-and-answer with NCYC participants. In 2019, Pope Francis sent a pre-recorded message to the participants at NCYC. In addition, Pope Benedict XVI gave a written blessing to participants one year, Gross said.

But popes have done similar exercises before. In 2023, Hulu released the documentary “The Pope: Answers” during which Francis answered questions from young adults. During the recent Jubilee for Youth, Leo held a brief question session with participants.

Organizers for NCYC say they are excited that American high schoolers will have a turn talking with the pope.

“There is no way to fully understand the impact of an experience like this for a young person,” Gross said. “But they will be able to say when they are older or even when they go back to school, ‘I heard directly from the Holy Father who spoke to me, as a young person in the middle of the United States and it was powerful’.”

“They may never go to Rome, or may never meet him. But they will have had that experience at NCYC and I think that is just remarkable.”

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