If you didn’t get a chance to see any of the pictures from World Youth Day, you missed out. Here is a BBC correspondent’s take on the event.
One million people. That’s how many showed up for Mass at WYD. One million. Here’s how the Boston Globe put it:
Pope Benedict XVI, wrapping up his first foreign trip, celebrated Mass yesterday for an estimated 1 million people on a field in his native Germany, quieting questions about whether the cerebral conservative could rally the young people who in the past had flocked to see the more instinctively charismatic Pope John Paul II.
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In his homily at the concluding Mass, Benedict stuck largely to theological themes, urging the young people to go to Mass and confession; to be forgiving, sensitive, and sharing; to reach out to the elderly and those who are suffering; and to spread the Catholic faith to others. He also urged them to form communities of faith, giving a nod to the surge in recent years of international lay Catholic religious movements that have energized some segments of the church.
But Benedict also offered a critique of more general societal trends in religion, in which many people pick and choose a combination of rituals and beliefs that please them.
”There is a kind of new explosion of religion,” Benedict said. ”I have no wish to discredit all the manifestations of this phenomenon. There may be sincere joy in the discovery. Yet if it is pushed too far, religion becomes almost a consumer product. People choose what they like, and some are even able to make a profit from it.”
Benedict, 78, went on to exhort the young people to become ”true worshipers of God.”
Not the autocratic, severe image of “God’s Rottweiler” the liberal critics wanted to pigeon-hole Pope Benedict XVI from the beginning, is it?
Of course, this article asks the very real and serious question as to whether or not the seeds John Paul II has sown are on the verge of a Catholic Renaissance. Some might consider it idle chest thumping from a Catholic Church hobbled by scandal and corruption, but the youth who flocked to JP II are older, wiser, and more aware of the world they are living in. The numbers at Cologne amazed skeptics and supporters alike.
As a member of the World Council of Churches put it, “The miracle of Cologne” had returned the Roman Catholic Church to a golden age. The faithful, from 197 countries, are not likely to forget how they coalesced in this community of Christians – a kind of United Nations under the aegis of Christ.
“We understood one another without speaking a word,” a young woman said.
While this article mentions a reporter’s dissent that young people want examples rather than theology, I disagree that ranking applause is a good barometer. Seriously, how often do you wildly applaud when you are ingesting ideas? I sit patiently and learn; it’s what we’re starving for in the world today. Benedict’s message went to the heart of Catholic action, and there’s no question that he was loved for it.
There’s no question in my mind that some form of Catholic revival is coming, and not in the stern and harsh caricature that so many critics of Catholicism love to paint. Benedict presents Catholics with a faith that both believes and teaches, a faith whose love of truth and love of Christ transcend. It is welcoming, but in the sense that it is a love of Christ and not this undescribed, self-effacing and meaningless idea (love, faith, community, whatever you’d like to fill in) that should be the focus of ecumenical dialouge and evangelization.
How it comes is another question altogether, but in the end the faithful are ready to stand up and be counted, not as believers or as mere examples, but as Christians willing to use their lives to exemplify Christ alone.
Theology 301 I guess. But it’s what I have on my mind.