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.