Atlanta archdiocese makes WYD bid

World Youth Day 2030 could come to the U.S.

The Archdiocese of Atlanta has asked the Vatican to consider it as a prospective host for the 2030 World Youth Day.

A successful bid would mean the certainty of a 2030 papal visit to the U.S., and make Atlanta the second U.S. city to host the international World Youth Day gathering.

Pilgrims attend World Youth Day’s opening Mass in Lisbon, Portugal, on Aug. 1, 2023. Credit: Filipe D’Avillez/Pillar Media.

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According to sources close to the process, Atlanta’s Archbishop Gregory Hartmayer first began discussing with Vatican officials the prospect of an Atlanta World Youth Day in late 2025, and has continued discussions about the bid with Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who is prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life.

Several sources told The Pillar that Hartmayer has spent several months shoring up support for his archdiocesan bid for World Youth Day. The archbishop’s proposal has reportedly garnered support from both the USCCB’s leadership, and civic leaders at the state and municipal level.

Hartmayer has begun developing a local committee of business and civic leaders to oversee archdiocesan planning responsibilities, sources said, and tasked collaborators with scouting venues in the Atlanta metropolitan region for the event, which would be expected to draw at least 1 million Catholics, especially given the customary participation of the pope in World Youth Day events.

The Archdiocese of Atlanta, home to roughly 1.2 million Catholics, is one of the fastest growing metropolitan sees in the United States, as the population center of American Catholicism shifts from the northeast toward the U.S. south.

Since 2000, the archdiocesan Catholic population has grown by approximately 400%, while Atlanta’s metropolitan region has grown by more than 1.5 million in the same period.

The archdiocese has reportedly proposed to make use of the customary World Youth Day hub-and-spoke housing arrangement, by which parishes across the region would host pilgrims, who made their way into the city center daily for World Youth Day activities, culminating in both vespers and a Mass celebrated by the pontiff outside of the city.

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The World Youth Day event was initiated in 1985 by Pope St. John Paul II, and has been celebrated as a global gathering every two or three years since then. Initially held every two years, the event has in recent years been held triennially or quadrennially.

In 1993, World Youth Day was held in the Archdiocese of Denver, Colorado. Church historians generally credit that gathering with significantly elevating the platform of World Youth Day as a global event, and with sparking a renewal of vocations, missions, movements, and Catholic apostolates across the United States.

The pope’s theme at the Denver World Youth Day focused especially on a call that young people to build in the U.S. a “culture of life.”

Young people, John Paul II said, should “place your intelligence, your talents, your enthusiasm, your compassion and your fortitude at the service of life!”

“Woe to you if you do not succeed in defending life. The Church needs your energies, your enthusiasm, your youthful ideals, in order to make the Gospel of Life penetrate the fabric of society, transforming people’s hearts and the structures of society in order to create a civilization of true justice and love,” the pontiff added.

“Do not be afraid to go out on the streets and into public places, like the first Apostles who preached Christ and the Good News of salvation in the squares of cities, towns and villages. This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel. It is the time to preach it from the rooftops. Do not be afraid to break out of comfortable and routine modes of living, in order to take up the challenge of making Christ known in the modern ‘metropolis.’”

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The most recent World Youth Day was held in Lisbon in 2023, with the next event scheduled for Seoul in 2027. Customarily, the location and year of the next World Youth Day is announced at the concluding Mass of the current one, with the 2030 event’s location expected to be announced at the conclusion of the Seoul World Youth Day.

While events at World Youth Day are co-planned by local organizers and Vatican officials, infrastructure and logistics are generally the purview of local leaders. While it is not clear what budget would be required to develop the infrastructure of the proposed Atlanta event, the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress raised more than $14 million to support a multi-day event attended by roughly 50,000 Catholics.

A successful bid from the Archdiocese of Atlanta would likely complicate questions about when Pope Leo XIV — the Church’s first U.S. born pope — will eventually make a pastoral visit to his home country.

Some Vatican insiders have expected that Leo’s inaugural visit to the U.S. would come during the 2029 National Eucharistic Congress. But given the pope’s customarily central role in World Youth Day — an event at which his presence has come to be expected — approval of the 2030 Atlanta World Youth Day bid would dim the prospect of the pontiff’s presence in the U.S. before that.

Both Vatican and USCCB officials have told The Pillar they believe it will take several years of logistical planning to facilitate the pope’s inaugural visit to the U.S., and that it is highly unlikely that two papal visits would be planned in the span of two years.

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The Archdiocese of Atlanta has not responded to The Pillar’s request for comment.