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U p F r o n t
By Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 4, Number 11
 November 1993 
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A FEW pages in you'll find my report on World
Youth Day as seen through the prism of Catholic Answers' work. As
the name of the event suggests, nearly everyone there was young. My
guess is that the median age was about nineteen.
Someone that age or even half again that age has no
recollection of the "Catholic ghetto." I use the term fondly.
When I was a young boy in the Chicago of the fifties, there were large
sections of the city in which, if you lived there, you could be forgiven
for thinking that the whole world was Catholic. All your playmates,
all the shopkeepers, all the policemen, even all the crooks were Catholic.
That kind of insularity hasn't existed for decades now.
It has been replaced, for many who remember it with
nostalgia (or neuralgia, as the case may be), with the unexpressed
fear that the handbasket has just about reached hell by now and that
there isn't much good news to report. But this is a sentiment you
would have been forced to abandon had you been with us in Denver.
Yes, there is plenty to grouse about--always has
been, always will be--but from World Youth Day we "vendors
of words" (Augustine's term) came away perhaps even more edified
than did the young people, because we were edified not just by the
Pope, as they were, but by them, and we were edified by the
bishops, priests, deacons, and religious we met.
That's one advantage of this work: When on the road
we can't help but see so many good things occurring in the Church
that we can't remain in a perpetual pout.
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