The mainstream media in the UK have in general downplayed the importance of WYD 2008 - so here is how ‘The Australian’, one of Australia’s leading newspapers summed up the event.
REGARDLESS of belief, the questions Pope Benedict XVI put to 400,000 attentive mass-goers at Randwick are pertinent to all Australians. “What will you leave to the next generation?” the 264th successor of St Peter asked yesterday. “Are you building your lives on firm foundations, building something that will endure? … What legacy will you leave to young people yet to come? What difference will you make?”
While deeply special to Catholics, who comprise more than a quarter of our nation, and to Sydneysiders who welcomed the pilgrims with warmth and generosity, World Youth Day belonged to all Australians. Like the 2000 Olympics, it stands proud as one of our great successes of the early 21st century - well-organised on a vast scale, secure and happy. We salute Cardinal George Pell for his vision and courage in securing it and Bishop Anthony Fisher and Danny Casey for making it work.
Inevitably, major international events bring inconveniences, but Sydneysiders, overwhelmingly, were good-natured in coping with the practical challenges like road closures, transport and security that had some media in an unnecessary frenzy early on. Perhaps the pilgrims’ cheerful friendliness and good behaviour brought out the best in the locals, and vice versa.
Even more than the Olympics, World Youth Day brought tens of thousands of visitors to other Australian cities, towns and the bush. From Broome to the Tasmanian forests, Cairns to Melbourne, which hosted 25,000 pilgrims, the Days in the Diocese that preceded the main event gave pilgrims from different countries close contact with Australian parishes and families, forming enriching friendships. By design, World Youth Day draws in as many participants as possible, and it remains a living memorial to the late, great Pope John Paul II, who understood instinctively why young people would respond to it.
His successor, the quieter, gentle and scholarly Joseph Alois Ratzinger, 81, stepped up easily to the role as star of the week, just as in Cologne three years ago. As Cardinal Pell said yesterday, the John Paul II generation - young and old - is proud to be faithful sons and daughters of Pope Benedict. Never was this more evident than during the spectacular boat-a-cade and motorcades, as throngs of flag-waving youngsters, with red and yellow backpacks, chanting “Benedetto” packed every turn.
The insights that mark this Vicar of Christ as a strong theologian were evident throughout. In his opening remarks at Barangaroo on Thursday, he posed important questions about freedom and tolerance becoming separated from truth: “This is fuelled by the notion, widely held today, that there are no absolute truths to guide our lives. Relativism, by indiscriminately giving value to practically everything, has made `experience’ all important. Yet, experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead, not to genuine freedom, but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect, and even to despair.”
If the Pope had a co-star, it was the city of Sydney, at its very best in wintry sunshine. It’s doubtful that any other pilgrim walk has offered vistas to match those from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Those who packed into the opening mass at Barangaroo, at which Cardinal Pell delivered the sermon of his life on salvation and hope, will never forget the striking, outdoor Cathedral that materialised between the waterfront sunset and the CBD, lighting up at dusk. And while Australia remains young in terms of Christian heritage, the Stations of the Cross at the city’s most striking sights made as moving, intense a religious experience as any centuries-old shrine in Europe. Viewed by an audience of about 500 million, it will help define Sydney for many around the globe and prompt some to venture to Australia.
World Youth Day also displayed Australia’s indigenous culture, especially performance and art, to the wider world. Indigenous dancers and actors brought richness and colour to all of the major events, and the home-grown paraclete, Marjorie’s Bird - the work of Melville island artist Marjorie Liddy - had a beauty and clarity that should make it an enduring symbol of the Holy Spirit in Australia.
For young Catholics who came from 177 countries, some with the odds stacked against them, like those from Burma, Pope Benedict encouraged them to keep the faith: “From the forlorn child in a Darfur camp, or a troubled teenager, or an anxious parent in any suburb, or perhaps even now from the depth of your own heart, there emerges the same human cry for recognition, for belonging, for unity,” he said. “Who satisfies that essential human yearning to be one, to be immersed in communion, to be built up, to be led to truth?”
Looking out on the vast congregation of more than 400,000 yesterday, Cardinal Pell reflected that the scene manifested the church as young and alive with evangelical energy, proclaiming an ancient message. Too often, as he noted, it is “weighed down and burdened with the sins and failings of her children, too often she appears disfigured and discouraged.”
No words of sorrow and regret can repair the hurts that many feel as a result of sexual abuse by clergy. But the pontiff’s apology in St Mary’s on Saturday morning, like those of Australian bishops before him, was full and sincere. The cathedral’s forefathers would have been profoundly shocked to think that some among the clergy could fall so low that their fiendish abuse of minors would warrant a papal apology on such an occasion as the dedication of a new altar containing the relics of heroic saints such as Thomas A’Beckett and Oliver Plunkett. In front of the seminarians, however, the priests of tomorrow, was the appropriate time and place for it to be made.
As the Pope and pilgrims fly home and Sydney returns to normal, it remains to be seen how much, if at all, the event has awakened a sense of the spiritual in Australians. Even if they do not embrace Catholicism, or any particular religion, adults who have tasted some of life’s triumphs and disasters, would concur with the Pope’s vision of the world being improved by overcoming “interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair”. The key, in his view, is a love that 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”. Such love, he said, liberates from shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which “deaden our souls and poison our relationships”. As it looks forward to WYD 2011, Madrid is a lucky city. It will be a long, long time before Australia sees a week like World Youth Day again.
