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Seventeenth Sunday of the Year
27 July 2008
Dear Friends in Christ,
From July 15th to 20th, Australia was home to World Youth Day 2008—the largest event ever held in Australia, including the 2000 Summer Olympics. Pilgrims came from all over the world to pray together, to study the Scriptures, to deepen their faith, and to be with the Successor of St. Peter. These gatherings began in Rome in 1985 during the International Youth Year convened by Pope John Paul the Great, and from that time World Youth Day has become an extraordinary global phenomenon, meeting in 1987 at Buenos Aires, in 1989 at Santiago de Compostela, in 1991 at Czestochowa, in 1993 at Denver, in 1995 at Manila (where the single largest crowd in human history assembled for the final Mass); in 1997 at Paris, in 2000 at Rome for the Great Jubilee; in 2002 at Toronto, and in 2005 at Cologne. The next World Youth Day will be in 2011 at Madrid.
During the final World Youth Day Mass last Sunday, the congregation of nearly 400,000 people constituted the 10th largest city in Australia, and most of the mainstream media could only report that the crowd was “smaller than organizers hoped for.” On Saturday night, over 100,000 teens and young adults camped out in the racecourse where the Sunday Mass was celebrated, and most of them could not sleep because the pilgrims were singing all night long, with groups from each nation singing their favorite hymns in a friendly competition with their neighbors. The only arrest during that remarkable week took place when a young Catholic man punched a protester who threw condoms into a group of pilgrims while screaming obscenities about Christian sexual ethics. In a more civilized age, the young Catholic would have been decorated for valor while the pagan who assaulted the pilgrims would have been arrested.
The World Youth Day meetings serve as a reminder that while Christendom may be dead, Christianity is not. The Gospel is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and when the Word of God is preached with conviction and the Sacraments of the New Covenant are celebrated with reverence, lives are changed. Pope Benedict, like John Paul before him, knows that the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe, and he spends himself tirelessly to awaken saving faith in the hearts and minds of people everywhere—starting with the young. In his homily at the closing Mass, Pope Benedict reminded the young adults that despite the great prosperity of the West, those who live without Christ are plagued by an “interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.” The answer? To believe in the Gospel which “discloses the truth about man and the truth about life” and to live by a love which “is not greedy or self-seeking, but pure, faithful and genuinely free, open to others, respectful of their dignity, seeking their good, radiating joy and beauty.” That is the truth that sets us free; that is why those young people traveled to the far side of the world to hear the Vicar of Jesus Christ announce the Good News of salvation.
Father Newman