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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
WITH THE POPE IN DENVER
By KARL KEATING
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This Rock
Volume 4, Number 11
 November 1993 
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FOR many Catholics, the highlight of the
year was seeing the Pope during World Youth Day. For others the highlight
was seeing the young people who saw the Pope. That's how it was for
members of the Catholic Answers staff and dozens of friends who joined
us in Denver to bolster the faith of the nearly 200,000 young Catholics
who journeyed there to be with their spiritual leader.
In all likelihood this was the final visit to America by this pope
and the last time for many years that World Youth Day, a biennial
event, will be held in this country. The cream of Catholic youth gathered
in Denver--the cream because from their ranks will come, over
the next decades, most of America's new priests, religious, and lay
leaders.
The Catholic Answers staff knew World Youth Day would attract dedicated
young Catholics, but we also knew most of them would be poorly trained
in their faith. That's just the way it is today. It's a result of
the almost uniformly poor catechesis given to Catholics of all ages
in this country (and in most of the rest of the world, for that matter).
We must not take the excitement, dedication, or zeal displayed by
the young pilgrims and extrapolate to a firm knowledge of the faith
and the ability to explain it to others. The former traits do not
imply the latter. This is a sad truth that Catholic Answers staffers
have learned from hundreds of parish seminars and thousands of telephone
calls and letters.
We had been alerted by newsletters and private contacts that several
anti-Catholic groups saw World Youth Day as a proselytizing bonanza.
In one city would gather hundreds of thousands of impressionable targets,
idealistic youths waiting (if they didn't yet realize it) to be told
the truth about the falsity of the Catholic Church. What proselytizer
could pass up such an opportunity to make countless converts?
We knew that professional anti-Catholics, many of whom we had encountered
before, could be effective if left to operate without opposition.
We concluded we had to do something to undermine their attacks on
the Pope and Catholic beliefs and to bolster the faith--and knowledge
of the faith--of the pilgrims they would accost.
But just what should we do? After brainstorming sessions, we decided
the best way to inculcate the elements of Catholicism would be through
an upbeat, eye-catching booklet, one we could distribute free. The
booklet would begin with an acknowledgment that the reader's faith
would be challenged in his everyday life and with the consolation
that there was no need to doubt that faith even if the reader couldn't
come up with quick answers to tough questions.
From that introduction the booklet would proceed to a consideration
of the divine origin, structure, and purpose of the Church. Then it
would look briefly at Scripture, Tradition, and the sacraments, would
explain prayers to Mary and the saints (since Fundamentalists always
complain about this aspect of the faith), and would cover salvation
(from the real scriptural perspective, of course). The booklet
would end with an exhortation designed to elicit action and a prediction
that if young Catholics respond, Catholicism can be the wave of the
future.
Patrick Madrid and James Akin were assigned to work on drafts of the
text while a graphic artist worked on the cover. Later I edited the
text and added opening and closing sections. Writing proceeded more
smoothly than we had anticipated.
The hardest part--perhaps a manifestation of writer's block--was
deciding on a title that was at once memorable and on point. Taking
1Timothy 3:15, which calls the Church "the pillar and foundation
of truth," and combining it with the Old Testament account of
how the Lord guided his people through the wilderness with a pillar
of smoke and fire (Ex. 13:21), I proposed Pillar of Fire, Pillar
of Truth, and there was general consent. We were on our way.
Actually, we were on our way months earlier. By the time the cover
was done and the text of the booklet was ready for the printer, we
had raised most of the funds needed to underwrite the production of
the 225,000 copies eventually distributed during World Youth Day.
In the July 1993 issue of This Rock I recounted how we undertook
a massive direct-mail program that netted enough to cover all the
printing costs plus the expenses we incurred in Denver.
We used three printers, two in Denver, one in Illinois. Working from
a prudent paranoia, we decided not to trust ourselves to a single
printing house, in case it burned to the ground the night before our
booklet was to be completed and our whole project was scuttled.
Each company printed 100,000 copies. Since not even World Youth Day
officials knew how many people were to attend the event, we wanted
to have plenty of copies to go around. Although the official registration
count ended up at 185,000 youths, we gave away 225,000 booklets, many
people taking multiple copies. We gave boxfuls to people from Eastern
Europe, Australia, and parts of America where, we thought, there was
special need. From each recipient of a bulk quantity we extracted
a promise that the booklets would be given without charge to young
Catholics, since that was the basis on which we had raised money for
the booklets' production.
The Denver printing companies kept the booklets in their warehouses
for us. The Illinois company shipped its copies to a warehouse in
Fort Collins, about an hour and a half north of Denver. That warehouse
is owned by The Intrepid Group, which charged us nothing for the use
of its space. (Special thanks go to Arthur Maranjian and Neil McCaffrey
III.)
We had to transport the booklets from Fort Collins to Denver. That
task was taken on by staffers Mark Wheeler and James Akin. Six of
us had flown into Stapleton Airport from San Diego. Mark and James
immediately caught a plane north, while staffer Maria Wainwright,
volunteer Michele McGeoghegan (who joined us as a "temporary
staffer" for the week), Robert Williams (making his regular visit
to us from his home in Wales), and I secured a rental van and headed
to our hotels. Patrick Madrid arrived on a later flight and rented
a third vehicle.
Our headquarters was the downtown Embassy Suites Hotel, about three-fourths
of a mile walk from Celebration Plaza, which was the temporary name
given to the civic center plaza in front of the capitol. At the Embassy
Suites we reserved a hospitality room on the eighth floor (our intention
was to entice bishops and other dignitaries into the room by offering
them complimentary snacks and drinks and then to explain to them the
activities of Catholic Answers). Our command post was a meeting room
on the ballroom level. Maria and Michele got to stay in the two rooms
in the eighth-floor suite; because we couldn't get additional rooms
downtown, the rest of us were relegated to a Marriott Hotel several
miles to the south.
We arrived in Denver Tuesday morning. By late afternoon we began our
first orientation session for volunteers. Another followed the next
morning, just before the commencement of World Youth Day activities.
Through This Rock we had advertised for helpers, and we calculated
we would need at least one hundred pairs of hands. After all, there
would be no way seven of us could distribute almost a quarter of a
million booklets on our own.
Through the mail more than enough people indicated they'd help us
in Denver, but many never showed up. Only thirty attended the orientations,
and we were discouraged. Could we pull it off with so few? But more
volunteers popped in as the week progressed. At final count we had
about sixty helpers, not counting several dozen other people, otherwise
unknown to us, who spontaneously offered to assist once our volunteers
were on the streets with their sacks of booklets.
Ah, yes, the sacks. We purchased one hundred canvas newspaper carrier
sacks and ordered the Catholic Answers logo imprinted on them in bright
orange. This proved to be one of our better decisions. The sacks held
just the right number of booklets--you could squeeze in four hundred,
but that was sensible only for weight lifters--and immediately
identified our volunteers as Catholic Answers people. By the end of
the week the sacks were status symbols. All you had to do was sling
one over your shoulders to get smiles and waves from passers-by. Besides,
the sacks made good keepsakes for the volunteers, whom we otherwise
could pay only with our thanks.
Back to the orientation sessions. Using overheads, we explained to
the volunteers what they were expected to do and what they were expected
not to do. They were to fill their sacks with booklets and
then fan out, some to Celebration Plaza, others to the registration
site, still others to places where the young participants were residing.
Our volunteers were encouraged to engage in discussions about the
faith (for some of them this would be their first chance to explain
and defend the faith in public), but we had a list of thou-shalt-nots.
Our volunteers were instructed not to pass out materials other than
Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth, nor were they to promote
their pet Catholic devotions, activities, or groups. We didn't want
mixed signals. After all, so far as the crowds were concerned, these
people were Catholic Answers, and they had to toe the party
line, which is exemplified by Augustine's famous dictum: "In
essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity."
If anyone held an unadmitted reservation about any aspect of the Catholic
faith, he was to keep it to himself for the duration. We didn't want
our group tarred with his brush.
The most important rules to follow were regulations about where materials
could be distributed. Off- limits, for example, was the pilgrimage
route from Celebration Plaza to Cherry Creek Park. Ditto for Celebration
Plaza itself except for our officially-sanctioned booth. Ditto again
for a long list of other places. Our people were good about following
the rules, but by the second day many other groups and individuals
ignored the letter and kept to what they considered to be the spirit
of the rules. Anti-Catholic proselytizers, for instance, were not
allowed into Celebration Plaza at all, but some came in anyway with
their banners and boxes of leaflets.
Admittedly our workers fudged a little. Told at first by World Youth
Day officials that all distributors had to stand within their booths
to give out literature, by the third day we, like vendors at other
booths, were on the sidewalk in front, the better to reach people
streaming by. No one objected, since the officials concluded overnight
that their regulations had been unnecessarily restrictive.
Wednesday, August 11, was the first full day of activities, and for
us it was especially full because Catholic Answers participated in
a debate that evening. The format was novel: a two-on-two debate,
with Patrick Madrid joining me against Bill Jackson, head of Christians
Evangelizing Catholics, and Ron Nemec, who heads a small ministry
in Grand Junction. The venue was South Sheridan Baptist Church in
Denver, and the audience was almost entirely unsympathetic to the
Catholic faith--just the kind of audience we prefer.
This, we knew, was an important debate precisely because of the make-up
of the audience. Most of these Protestants were devoted anti-Catholics;
many of them would join Jackson, Nemec, James White (also in town
for World Youth Day), and other professional anti-Catholics in proselytizing
young "Romanists." Patrick and I wanted to discourage the
listeners by undermining their complacency.
These folks knew the Catholic Church was wrong, and they were
planning to tell nearly 200,000 young Catholics the facts. We wanted
to give the proselytizers the real facts first, in hopes that
some of them, brought to their senses about the Catholic faith, might
decide to withdraw from the fray. Each proselytizer who stayed home
translated into thousands of anti-Catholic tracts that would not
be put into Catholic hands, and those undistributed tracts translated
into an unknown number of young Catholics who weren't bamboozled out
of their faith.
We don't know how many had their minds changed enough to relinquish
their proselytizing aspirations, but we do know which side won the
debate. This was painfully obvious by the time the opening remarks
were over. No one was under any illusions, not even Jackson and Nemec.
In his group's next monthly newsletter Jackson admitted we had had
by far the better of it: "During the debate the Catholic Answers
team displayed debating ability, caustic wit against their opponents,
and answers backed up by Tradition and Church magisterium. They won
the debate."
We weren't surprised, of course. What determined the outcome of the
debate even before the moderator opened the proceedings was not our
forensic skills, which are not superlative, but the evening's topic,
sola scriptura. This is the fundamental doctrine of Fundamentalists,
and the problem for self-described "Bible Christians" is
that all the good arguments, both biblical and logical, are on the
Catholic side.
Patrick and I divvied up the duties. In my opening remarks I dealt
with each verse our opponents might appeal to, demonstrating that
not a single verse in the Bible supports sola scriptura. Patrick
followed with a demonstration of the illogic of the Fundamentalist
position. This was a powerful one-two punch, and our opponents were
on the ropes all evening. We had an enjoyable time. (So will you:
The debate is available on audio tape; see the inside front cover
of this issue for information on how to obtain it.)
During his remarks Bill Jackson confirmed something we already knew:
Our mailing list contains infiltrators allied with him. In the months
prior to World Youth Day we had kept in contact with our prospective
volunteers. At the debate Jackson read from a letter we had written
to them. He could have obtained the letter only from someone posing
as a Catholic interested in helping out in Denver. No harm was done,
since nothing in the letter revealed "inside information,"
but we found the situation amusing.
Although Jackson's side did not succeed at the debate, he had prepared
a clever tract for distribution on the streets of Denver. It was titled
"Blessed Art Thou Among Women." The cover featured a haloed
Mary, and the back had these capitalized words: " "SPECIAL
COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE, VISIT OF POPE JOHN PAUL II, DENVER, COLORADO,
AUGUST 13-15, 1993," Sounds Catholic, doesn't it? At the
bottom of the back cover was this cryptic notation: "Published
by C.E.C., P.O. Box 621853, Littleton, Colorado 80162." The name
of the publisher is abbreviated--and with good reason. "C.E.C."
is short for "Christians Evangelizing Catholics," the group
Jackson heads.
Thousands of copies of this leaflet were given out on street corners
surrounding Celebration Plaza. Most of the people accepting copies
assumed from the front and back covers that it represented a Catholic
viewpoint. Had Jackson's group used truth in advertising, few Catholics
would have taken the leaflet, something he well knew from his many
years as a missionary to Catholics. As it was, whenever our staffers
or volunteers mentioned to people that the leaflet was anti-Catholic,
recipients headed en masse for the nearest trash can.
I recollect one funny if ecologically incorrect incident. I came to
a corner opposite the main entrance to Celebration Plaza and saw a
teenager giving out hundreds of copies of Jackson's leaflet. Young
Catholics were taking them gratefully, thinking, from the image of
Mary, that they must be Catholic. This was too much for me. Fingering
the miscreant, I yelled to everyone within earshot that copies should
not be accepted and that copies already accepted should be thrown
away because the leaflet was opposed to the Catholic faith.
The milling youths became incensed. Within moments scores of leaflets
hit the ground and were stomped on, the nineties equivalent of shaking
the dust off your sandals. The teenaged proselytizer, realizing he
had lost his advantage, took off for the next corner. Unknown to me,
a few Catholics followed. One boy, smiling broadly, returned with
his buddies in a few minutes. He crowed that he had snatched from
the hands of the anti-Catholic his entire supply of leaflets and had
tossed them in the trash. Not wanting to quench entirely this overheated
zeal, I noted gently that stealing even from Fundamentalists is a
sin, but I allowed that perhaps the young Catholic might have the
defense of righteous anger--after all, he could argue a parallel
with the cleansing of the Temple.
Zeal was never absent from the Catholic Answers booth either. As one
of about forty officially-sanctioned groups, Catholic Answers was
able to hawk its wares under a canopy in Celebration Plaza. (The canopy
was most welcome; it protected us and our booklets from the glaring
sun and from several short but intense rain showers.)
Setting-up duties kept me at the hotel longer than I had anticipated,
and I wasn't able to arrive at the booth until Wednesday afternoon.
James, Robert, Mark, and several volunteers had been manning it since
early morning. A dynamo, James had been speaking for hours, and his
face was a waterfall of sweat. Robert, witty and engaging, never showed
a hint of British reticence; he gregariously promoted the faith.
Mark, while simultaneously giving out booklets, engaged in discussions
with youths and their chaperones. All this was true of our volunteers
also.
The grass behind the booth was strewn with empty boxes, testimony
to how many thousands of booklets had been distributed already, and
soon Mark had to go down the street to the truck, where he off loaded
boxes onto a dolly. This frequent trek was unavoidable. Vehicles were
not allowed near Celebration Plaza except for a few minutes in the
early morning and late night; if vendors ran out of goods during the
day, as we did with regularity, they had to cart them in by hand.
Once home, Mark noted he never had worked so hard in his life. The
rest of us were exhausted too, and rarely had we ever had such a grand
time. The most apt word for the week is "non-stop": That's
the way it was until near the end of the event, by which time nearly
everyone at World Youth Day had received Pillar of Fire, Pillar
of Truth.
In my absence from the booth Bishops Charles Chaput of Rapid City
and Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa, long-time friends of our apostolate,
stopped by to say hello and give encouragement, as did many other
bishops, most of whom seemed to have an uncanny sense of just when
to visit the booth--which was when I wasn't around. One
of the unlucky visitants was Archbishop Elden F. Curtiss of Omaha.
He found me home, as did several other bishops, including one from
Crete, with whom we had to converse in fractured French.
In total perhaps three dozen bishops stopped to chat, and each was
supportive. Episcopal praises were received even before the event.
Bishop Enrique San Pedro, S.J. of Brownsville, for instance, sent
a note saying, "I congratulate you and your staff on such an
accomplishment in trying to meet the needs of our youth." Bishop
San Pedro, his brother bishops who had come to Denver, the thousands
of priests and religious in attendance, and of course the young people
themselves knew what the purpose of World Youth Day was. Not
everyone did. If your perception of the gathering came through the
national media, then your perception of the event bears about as much
relation to its real shape as a Salvador Dali drooping clock bears
to your wristwatch. I mean national media coverage was lousy.
In a column he wrote after World Youth Day, Cardinal Roger Mahony
of Los Angeles recounted a representative incident. While on their
way to Denver, several youths and the Cardinal were interviewed by
a television crew. "While the first couple of questions dealt
with the journey so far, it wasn't long before the reporter hit the
issues she was really interested in," wrote the Cardinal. "Her
third question to the young people went something like this: `I suppose
you're really concerned about how rigid the Pope is about abortion
rights.' The response was, `Huh?'
"She pressed on. `Surely you don't agree with the Pope on women's
ordination.' One kid shot back: `Ma'am, we're on our way to join with
thousands of other kids to express our faith, to be together, and
to see the Pope. We're not on some protest trip.' The reporter was
speechless," said the Cardinal. "The responses weren't supposed
to go like this. After all, the media had been doing its polls and
every Catholic in the country was supposed to disagree with the Pope
on almost everything. And I would bet you anything that segment of
the interview never made it on the evening news."
(Speaking of the evening news, we almost had a chance to clean it
up for a while. The day we arrived at the Embassy Suites two of our
staffers ran into David Brinkley and Cokie Roberts in the elevator.
In light of the biased coverage later given, it might have been a
public service to confine them in a locked janitor's closet for the
remainder of the week.)
In contrast to the network broadcasts, local television coverage was
excellent. The reporters took care to refer to the Pope as "His
Holiness" and "the Holy Father," and nearly every major
event was covered in detail and without the smarmy commentary Catholics
have come to expect. Denver-based newscasters reported the story in
the proper proportions. By Sunday most of us were too exhausted to
awaken at 4:00 A.M. to work our way into the back rows at
Cherry Creek Park for the papal Mass. We watched a local station from
the comfort of the hospitality suite and were entirely pleased with
the coverage. It was almost as if the station had hired believers.
The national media gave far more air time to protesters on the left
than to the anti-Catholic Fundamentalists who outnumbered the protesters,
and it often seemed the media even gave more coverage to the protesters
than they did to the Pope himself. From viewing the networks you might
have thought Denver was jammed with homosexual and feminist agitators.
In fact there were barely one hundred feminist demonstrators across
town from Celebration Plaza, and the homosexual lobby turned out only
thirty people, one of whom made the evening news on Friday by getting
arrested for chaining himself to a fence. His comment to the cameras:
"In the words of Sinead O'Connor [who on national television
had torn up a photo of the Pope], `Fight the real enemy!'"
Even if you don't count the locals who crammed the papal Mass and
boosted the crowd to about half a million, these left-wing protesters
were outnumbered 2,000 to 1 by the young Catholics, and they should
have received proportionate air time (which would have worked out
to a total of two minutes aired in the wee hours), but of course they
didn't.
Even anti-Catholic proselytizers had a reason to feel slighted. They
outnumbered the homosexuals and feminists, and they were at Celebration
Plaza and the other key sites, while the left-wing extremists were
cordoned off by police in a section of downtown we never could locate.
How many proselytizers were there? Consider the street corners surrounding
Celebration Plaza on Wednesday afternoon. On one were two men from
a church that is an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists. They carried
a ten-foot banner strung between tall poles; the banner's message
was that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon. In front of
the banner six helpers handed out anti-Catholic literature and engaged
Catholics in spirited talk.
In the nearby crosswalk, standing on the median strip, was a minister
from a Fundamentalist church. Despite the direct sun, he wore a dark
suit. He too had literature. A block up was a table behind which sat
another Adventist; he was giving away reprints of one of Ellen Gould
White's books. Between him and the folks with the banner walked other
proselytizers; they passed out copies of an anti-Catholic newspaper.
On another corner near Celebration Plaza was the teenager with Bill
Jackson's tract. Fifty yards away walked James White, explaining Rome's
errors to a companion, and Ron Nemec was on the loose also.
That's what you could have seen just by turning your head. On the
far side of the plaza, just out of vision and beyond the area where
giant speakers and stadium-sized screens presented musical entertainment,
stood more anti-Catholics. Still others could be found on neighboring
streets, in the downtown mall, at the stadium--wherever young
people gathered or passed by.
You couldn't walk a block without being accosted by another set of
proselytizers. On the other hand, some proselytizers couldn't walk
a block without being shadowed by Catholics. Paul Czarnota recounts
a story about Ron Nemec. "Paul Rowan first saw him on the street
and asked him, `Are you still in the tract business?' Nemec answered,
`Yeah.' Then I spotted him and his assistant as they toddled up the
block. Nemec and his partner took up a position at the central entrance
to the stadium, where Mass was being celebrated. They started handing
out the BVM tract from Christians Evangelizing Catholics. I stood
between them and the street, intercepting people leaving the stadium
and encouraging them to trash the tracts. One Catholic man, knowing
who Nemec was, tried to get extra copies of the tract. Nemec caught
on and started to whiz verses at him. John Fenn defended the man,
saying, `You're only trying to make him feel inadequate and unsaved
because he can't quote Scripture as fast as you. Memorizing Bible
verses doesn't save you.' Nemec, flustered, said, `Don't put words
in my mouth.'
"To minimize the damage the tracts might do, John tailed Nemec
for half an hour, until Nemec, in frustration, told a policeman he
feared John was going to mug him. The cop walked over to John and
said, `Look, I'm a Catholic and don't believe a word he said, but,
if he wants to file a complaint, I won't be able to ignore him,' so
John ended his dogging.
"But his efforts weren't wasted. He kept Nemec away from the
stadium, where after Mass we gave out thousands of booklets. Amanda
Nelson and Connie Wright worked one of the entrances. Adventists were
there, distributing their anti-Catholic material. When they saw volunteers
from Catholic Answers, they packed up and left. Not very macho, these
Adventist types!"
By Friday afternoon our work was winding down. Since the booths were
to be dismantled the next morning, there wasn't much left for us to
do. Besides, nearly everyone had a copy of the booklet by this time.
(We later estimated we had gotten Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth
into the hands of ninety percent of the World Youth Day participants.)
That evening, the staff and volunteers, needing a break and a corporate
sign of thanks, gathered for a backyard barbecue at the home of Rosina
Kovar, who, with Celeste Thomas, graciously oversaw the feeding of
dozens of famished evangelists. While burgers were being downed, Patrick
and I told self-deprecating jokes (the best kind), and we reported
that several people from overseas had offered to help in translating
the booklet into their native languages. Taking turns, nearly everyone
stood up and recounted particularly memorable incidents of the week.
Some stories were mailed in to us later.
Dolores Tiegs said, "I saw a poster [held by anti-Catholics]
that depicted the Pope as the leader of a `cannibalism cult'--eating
the body and blood of Christ. A large group of young Catholics, also
seeing the poster, loudly and clearly prayed the Our Father and then
walked away. I was impressed at how they handled the situation."
Helen Raiche's sons traveled to Denver: "They reported that the
people coming out of the Mass immediately destroyed the Fundamentalists'
literature. They had been well informed ahead of time, thanks to your
booklet" (many copies of which were sent to pilgrims before they
left for Denver).
The visitors had plenty to put up with. Robert Altland remarked that
his group "went to the vigil, suffered from the heat, became
tired and dirty. A few became sick. We took the food we had on the
bus for our trip home and gave it to those sick or lost or who had
nothing to eat since morning." While the young people he accompanied
attended the overnight vigil at Cherry Creek Park, awaiting the morning's
papal Mass, the school they were lodging in was broken into. "Some
of the girls were robbed; all had their personal things thrown around.
All of us were upset, but none of us was discouraged." When they
finally arrived home in Kansas City, "many stayed up to talk,
laugh, pray, and say the rosary."
That's a good image to end with: laughing and praying. World Youth
Day was a time for good fellowship, even for those no longer young,
and it was a time to re-root oneself in the faith. It was a tonic
for those worried about the future of the Church, and it was a sign
that God is preparing a new generation of spirited Catholics.
Karl Keating is the author of Catholicism and
Fundamentalism and is the editor of This Rock.
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