THOUGHTS ON WORLD YOUTH DAY
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Our booklet "Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth" was published originally for use at the 1993 World Youth Day, which was held in Denver. There we reached hundreds of thousands of young Catholics with our overview and defense of the Catholic faith.
Why did we show up? Because we expected that anti-Catholic proselytizers would be in town, trying to woo the young Catholics away from the faith of their upbringing. We were right. The anti-Catholics were everywhere.
I vividly remember Fundamentalists who stood on the median at a major intersection. They passed out literature right and left. Some of their tracts were cleverly composed.
The cover of one showed an image of the Virgin Mary. Looking at it, you would think the tract promoted Marian doctrines and devotion. Quite the opposite. The text inside argued that Catholic beliefs and practices concerning Mary were all wrong.
Then there was a subset of the Seventh-Day Adventists. Its representatives staked out a good location and handed out their book "National Sunday Law." Its argument is that the early Christians went wrong when they changed corporate worship from Saturday to Sunday. The villain in the story was the Catholic Church. The hero (heroine, actually) was Ellen Gould White, founder of the Seventh-Day Adventist denomination.
Until she came along, everyone had been worshiping on the wrong day of the week, and all those faiths that promoted Sunday worship--with the Catholic Church chief among them--were displeasing to God. If you wanted to be a real Christian, you had to say good-bye to the Church headed by that fellow from Poland.
Originally World Youth Day was to be held yearly, one year with an international gathering, such as at Denver, and the next with diocesan gatherings, always including one in Rome itself. The schedule has not alternated cleanly, as you can see by looking at the listing of World Youth Days at:
http://www.vatican.va/gmg/documents/
Catholic Answers staff members have attended each of the international World Youth Days since 1993. This year's event will be held in Cologne. The last international meeting was in 2002 in Toronto, and in the jubilee year of 2000 the event was in Rome.
Each time we have reached hundreds of thousands of young people with "Pillar" and with other materials, teaching them the rudiments of the faith while instilling in them a sense of gratitude for being Catholic and a sense of wariness concerning the anti-Catholic literature they were bound to be handed.
NOT YOUR STANDARD PILGRIMAGE
Measuring the long-term effect of World Youth Day is not easy. In many ways it is more an affective than an intellective event. There is plenty of catechesis going on--you can check the daily schedule at the Vatican web site to see what I mean--but also much by way of cultural and social activities.
World Youth Day should not be faulted for not being what it never was intended to be. It is not a pilgrimage in the sense of Catholics walking from one spot to another, praying the rosary along the way. There is something of that to it, but chiefly there are lectures and study sessions and, as I said, cultural and social activities, not to mention the appearance of the Pope.
Everything takes place within a circumscribed area. You might have to go a few blocks or even a few miles to reach the next venue, such as the papal Mass, but it is not as though you were hiking across Spain on your way to Compostela.
Traditional pilgrimages attract, almost exclusively, the already-devout. World Youth Day attracts the devout but also the potentially-devout.
Over the years we have received countless notes from attendees telling us how much they profited spiritually from World Youth Day and how much "Pillar" and our other materials helped them. Many young Catholics said they actually liked seeing anti-Catholics on the streets because they got a chance to brush up on their debating skills!
PLUSES AND MINUSES
But let's be frank: If you walk the crowds at World Youth Day, you will find mixed motives. The large majority of the young Catholics--most of them are teenagers; few of them are over 25--go because they love their faith, want to learn more, or want to see the Pope.
Those are all fine motives, some better than others. But you can't help suspecting that not a few young people go because they just want to be with others their age in a gigantic crowd. Religious concerns are secondary to them.
That is something that happens when you have a mass event that is open to anyone, Catholic and non-Catholic, fervent and lukewarm, spiritual and worldly.
If you want to find something to complain about at World Youth Day, you can. If you want to find something disedifying, you can. If you want to see young Catholics who can't tell you the difference between a dogma and a dog, you can.
In theory I do not object to people complaining about World Youth Day. I have my own doubts about the long-term utility of such a large-scale gathering.
Do the man-hours put into arranging the event pay a sufficient dividend? Would it be better to host a much smaller but more spiritually intense gathering? Does World Youth Day put too much emphasis on rah-rahing and not enough on forming the mind?
Those are legitimate concerns, and it would not be out of bounds for a Catholic to argue that, on the whole, World Youth Day has not been worth the trouble. There is nothing improper in doing a cost-benefit analysis and concluding that the costs outweigh the benefits.
TOGETHER AT CAMP O-ONGO
But if complaints are to be levied, they should be reasonable. There are not many reasonable complaints in a long anti-World Youth Day article in the current issue of "Catholic Family News," a Traditionalist monthly.
I do not have the time or the interest to counter each weakness in Marian T. Horvat's article. Let me look at just one, selected because it is representative of her approach.
She dislikes boys and girls consorting with one another at World Youth Day. She says, "It was always against Catholic morals for youth of mixed sexes to travel together like one big family for camping trips or overnight retreats." Is that so?
When I was in the sixth grade our class spent a few days at a mountain campground run by the school district. We rode up together in the buses, boys and girls. At Camp O-Ongo we stayed in separate cabins, but the daily activities were undertaken in common. We even roasted hot dogs at the same campfires. There was a problem with this?
You may recall that several times I have led readers of this E-Letter on summertime hikes in the Sierra. Each time we have had backpackers ranging from retirement age down to barely-out-of-high-school age. Many were unmarried, and at wilderness campsites we pitched tents a few yards apart. There was a problem with this?
If there was nothing amiss with my hiking companions sleeping within snoring distance of one another, why must some people jump to the conclusion that there was something amiss with young Catholics being housed in a tent city?
OVERACTIVE IMAGNATION
Horvat writes, "What happened in some of those tents can be left to the imagination of the reader." I suppose it depends on whose imagination. The tent cities are crowded, and it is hardly possible to do something without everyone around you knowing about it. If your stomach rumbles, the kids in the neighboring tents will hear it.
Could it be that, as Horvat fears, you-know-what occurred in some of those tents? With sometimes half a million teenagers and young adults present, the likelihood is that it did, somewhere--but how common would it have been, and would its occurrence be enough to damn the whole of World Youth Day?
I am asking for a sense of proportion here. Horvat lists many complaints against World Youth Day, but her argument concerning the proximity of males and females is phrased in such a way that she seems to think it sufficient, on its own, to demonstrate that the event should be scrapped. I disagree.
Maybe she never saw Frank Capra's 1934 movie "It Happened One Night," starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. This "screwball comedy" at one point had the two unmarried protagonists sharing, out of necessity, a dumpy motel room, with privacy afforded by a divider that Gable fashioned from a rope and blanket.
In an era of strict moral regulations, the movie was not given a thumbs-down by the Catholic-run Legion of Decency. Perhaps Horvat can learn from this.
p.s., It's official. We now have more people signed up for this year's apologetics cruise than for any of its predecessors--and we are just entering what usually is considered the prime "sign up season," which runs until the end of July.
We don't want to turn YOU away, so I suggest you immediately visit our special cruise web site to discover why so many already have signed up to join us in the Mexican Riviera from November 6-13.
The address is:
www.catholicanswerscruise.com
p.p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at
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where you may post your comment in the forum dedicated to the E-Letter. You will find a thread devoted to this issue of the E-Letter. Feel free to add your comment in the form of a reply to that thread.
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