Looking back at WYD 2011:
'A green dog' among
Pope Benedict's young people
by MANUEL MILIÁN MESTRE
Translated from the 2/22/12 issue of
It's not an easy task for me to review a book -
Un perro verde entre los jóvenes del Papa (A green dog among the Pope's young people)(Madrid, Khaf, 2011, pagine 177) — which intends to be only an 'account'. "A chronicle is just a chronicle", of course, but there are many ways of reporting a mass event with a million and a half of the universe that crowded the squares and streets of Madrid and who filled up every open space at Cuatro Vientos airport.
And it could not have been described much better, as in: "Cuatro Vientos (four winds) which the night of the prayer vigil became furibond hurricane winds, as if Evil wished to destroy that testimonial of hope and of happy youth", which the philosopher Antonio Marino wrote in
El Mundo the day after. "God is not the explanation of evil, but rebellion against evil".
The almost Biblical multitude under the torrid sun of that summer Sunday at CuatroVientos proclaimed the philosopher's point: "God is more powerful than evil",
And I am obviously referring to the August of that boiling summer of 2011 in Madrid. To the enormous joy of that World Youth Day, which had unleashed so much stupid polemic earlier from a litigious faction of Spanish society that has not yet overcome its complexes nor exorcised its demons from a past marked by an absurd - and anti-democratic - anti-clericalism.
We who have the blood of martyrs and so many others who were killed in 1936, or the day after 1939, cannot understand such rancor, such implacable bitterness.
But Catalan writer Arturo San Agustin has written an account that is personal and splendidly subjective about those days of August which painted joy on the streets of Spain in the form of young pilgrims rallying to a symbol that continues to be much challenged in our day - the Cross of sacrifice.
It is the evident antithesis to hedonism, to consumerism, the stupid emptiness of men who have become very distant from God, and who are truly immersed in the chaos of that emptiness.
That is why San Agustin entitled his account 'A green dog among the Pope's young people" - that is to say, that 'strange thing' present among the multitudes who proclaimed their faith in God during those parched days of a summer that was almost cruelly hot, with their caps and backpacks and walking shoes, irrigating with their sweat the sultry heat that became light for those young spirits.
{The more direct meaning of San Agustin's title - a green dog is a Hispanic metaphor for any rare figure or object, particularly one that is usually kept away - is that San Agustin considered himself 'a green dog' who had come to cover WYD, and came away instead cherishing 'the green dog' of faith in a secular world that those young pilgrims embodied in joyful piety.]
There is no more beautiful hope than that which smiles from the eyes of a young girl and on the lips of all the races on earth united in one voice in prayer and song.
The Catalan journalist has written not just a chronicle but produced a painting, with light and shadow, with diverse colors, with mystic elements surfcing from the multitudes as if in search of a monastic retreat during that silence which was "the environmental condition which favors internal recollection best, to listen to God and to meditate" (p. 21). And this was the paradox: "coming up against each other's solitude in that immense ocean of screaming youth".
Moreover, his tried and tested reporter's sensibility unmasks the detractors of WYD, such as "Spanish atheists are like the snail, which go out when the rain stops, but do so backwards", p 31) or " No one enjoys being ridiculed - and that is why Benedict XVI's visit made the 'indignados' indignant" (p. 48)
And what of these indignados? Who give voice to a message that is hypercritical but witbhout an alternative to offer. They felt challenged by a whole multitude of persons happy to have found the way to full realization in Jesus Christ.
For them, it was almost an offense, since they are incapable of understanding that Christian hope is the joy of those who, like the stoics, find happiness in virtue.
But do these indignados, who are ideological night-wanderers, even understand what happiness is? With his lucid independence, the narrator of this living portrait does not fear to say 'what he thinks', as he harangues, for instance, against whatever seems easy for the protestors ("Shooting at Benedict XVI or a cardinal would be much easier than other things"). Or contradicting those who claimed that "the (Pope's) trip was organized around the idea of religion as spectacle".
It is clear that Madrid was the crucible in which were fused all the sensibilities (often quite paradoxical) of Christianity today which no longer knows geographical racial or cultural bounds. The simple faith of our ancestors has been replaced by the internal need to find authentic responses to the anguishing problems of our society which has become skeptical to the point of paroxysm.
It has been said that there is no place for faith in the light of scientific knowledge, a staple of Masonic thought, and yet, in fact, many of the young people at WYD were university students ("More than half of the pilgrims had university education" and "The median age was 22").
This was the key point of WYD: that more than a million and a half young people - enthusiastic, joyous and conscious of their seeking Christ - placed their own faith on the line to reinforce its reason and consistency.
And the Pope grasped all of that - from Cuatro Vientos, as from the multitudes in prayer during the evening Via Crucis, when the aesthetic traditions of Andalusia and Castile offered their baroque images in a most unusual context, in which the lament of the various
saetas (flamenco singers) lacerated the meditative silence in an expression of popular sorrow that obviously moved young people from Asia, Africa and Oceania who had never experienced this type of religious drama before.
Some of the neo-Cathecnuemals have said: "We should build audacious and courageous churches" - But what greater church than that river of joyful smiling faces that inundated the streets of Madrid to announce a new religiosity which energetically repelled old disbeliefs, or old academic disaffections, with their songs, their orderly conduct even amid joyful vigils held in colleges, schools, churches and stadiums, with their guitars and testimonials, and with silence when necessary as at the aerodrome of Cuatro Vientos!
San Agustin tells of
a visibly wonder-filled Benedict XVI looking at the human sea before him, "with the same eyes of the child he was whom I continue to associate with his knapsack and leather shorts, the green valleys and golden mountains of his native Bavaria" where the faith is flourishing and boisterous, festive as the blond beer invented by her monks.
The beauty of the kind and tender face of the aged pontiff all aglow from the splendor of so many young people who still respect the elderly, and who admire a Pope who is courageous, direct and fearless in acknowledging the faults of the Church, while being able to lift their spirits to the point of letting them recover the full breadth of Christian hope.
Whether you like it or not, this culture of the peoples of Europe, chiselled by the Christianity that educated the centuries of the Middle Ages, and all those that followed, up to our present post-modernity, is that in which we live.
The warmth of Christianity comes from the enthusiasm which dwells in the spirit of the believer and which was shared by those multitudes in Madrid anxious to hear the Word of Jesus of Nazareth - he whose hand never wavered in chasing out the merchant blasphemers of the Temple and whose voice resounded in the Sermon on the Mount, a moral code of human conduct that has not been overturned, not even by those like Nietszche, who claimed to have ruptured the unity of ethics and morality, afflicting the 20th century and not a few European intellectuals.
Once more in Madrid, Benedict XVI enchanted young people with the depth and beauty of his ideas and his thought.
A young Jesuit confided to the chronicler of this tableau vivant: "This Pope is better read than heard, because his characteristic ideas are those that must be thought about at length, meditated, reflected upon. He is about the profound and transcendent, nothing theatrical, nor even that necessary and inevitable peddling of ideas to the masses that all political leaders undergo to lend themselves authoritativeness".
After translating this, I decided to look up the book itself online - it came out in October 2011, barely two months after the event, so I don't know why it took all this time for the OR to get to it - and has been very well reviewed. I hope to translate some of the reviews but for now, let me just quote at random from one of them:
"(San Agustin) makes us feel, as in the Gospel, as blind as we were, that WYD Madrid was mystery and miracle - with Christ, and with that Pope who is all refinement and style of purest white who is Benedicto, blessed. It was conversion, metanoia."
The last line echoes what the Holy Father said about Lent at the GA last Wednesday. I keep being amazed at the unabashed fervor and wonder of Spanish Catholic writers and commentators today. I should find a more regular way of keeping track of them.
This related article was on the same page of the 2/22/12/OR:
WYD: When the Church makes
MSM news in a positive way
by Gianluca Biccini
Translated from the 2/22/12 issue of
"We can all declare ourselves satisfied at the success of World Youth Day in Madrid, because it contributed to make our country and her ecclesial comm8unity better known."
So said the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See, María Jesús Figa López-Palop, who has no doubt that the Church makes news and that WYD held in the Spanish capital last August confirmed this, even in numbers.
This was the topic at a round table discussion held Tuesday night at the Spanish embassy in Piazza di Spagna. All the speakers agreed that the gathering of youth from all five continents with Benedict XVI was a media success.
Those who spoke were the man who was in charge of WYD-madrid's social networking, Antonio Gallo; the vice-director of the Catalan newspaper
La Vanguardia, Enric Juliana; the editor of the Spanish magazine
Vida Nueva, Juan Rubio;. and Vatincaistas Marco Ansaldo of
La Repubblica and Gian Guido Vecchi of
Corriere della Sera.
Moderator was Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, who also answered questions towards the end of the evening.
With priests and religious serving in Rome, among them the secretary of the Holy See's Prefecture of Economic Affairs, Mons. Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda, also present were members of the diplomatic corps to the Holy See, with its dean, Alejandro Emilio Valladares Lanza, and media professionals including the editor of this newspaper.
Opening the discussion, the Spanish ambassador made clear that when she first organized the event to evaluate its media impact six months later, she did not imagine it would take place at a time of great media agitation in reporting news about the Church.
Mons. Celli said that the 'reality' is so complex and the news cycle has become so tight that communications has become even more of a difficult challenge in itself. Especially where it concerns the Pope and the Church.
Thus, the question is relevant what makes news about the Church, and even before that, what constitutes news. He cited the editor of Le Figaro, Hippolyte de Villemessasnt, who said that for Parisian readers, an attic fire in the Latin Quarter was more important than a revolution in Medrid.
"Looking at newspaper articles and headlines and following some radio-TV services," Mons. Celli said, "one could ask, 'But where is the news?'"
Celli said information reporting today had three great problems: when the insignificant becomes an 'event'; mutilated representations of fact, in which the presentation is from a very narrow viewpoint as to deform reality, if not to directly disinform; and instrumentalization.
"The Church is subject to all three risks," he said, "which is the challenge we face daily".
He pointed out that the disappearance of great reporting and ideas about religion have favored the proliferation of minimal reporting, or parochial and often distorted representations of reality.
Also contributing to this is the virtual world, where there is little source verification, and which therefore helps amplify reporting of 'facts' that never even happened.
However, all such challenges were successfully overcome in Madrid, and the three participants representing Spanish media agreed that the 'media balance' of WYD reporting was 'more than positive'.
Indeed, it was an unprecedented success, they said, not just for the traditional communications media, but also in the social networks online, in which the participants, besides merely being online users, were also providers of information in real time.
And each one of them - Gallo, Juliano and Rubio - from their respective positions, agreed that "the Church makes news" with events like WYD which brought together such a huge gathering of young people from all over the world despite the economic crisis and the punishing heat of August in Madrid.
Italian newsmen Ansaldo and Vecchi concurred, saying that WYD was a well-followed event and one in which even those who were reporting on it were 'infected' with the joy of the event.
A flashback to WYD ten years ago:
WYD-Toronto
10 years later
Feb. 24, 2012
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the last World Youth Day attended by Pope John Paul II, which happened in Toronto, Canada.
The theme of the 2002 event was "You are the salt of the earth ... you are the light of the world", and it brought nearly half a million people to the city.
After a decade, the priest most involved with bringing WYD to Canada reflected on its significance.
“I’ve always said that World Youth Day is a timed-released capsule,” said Father Thomas Rosica, C.S.B., the National Director of the Toronto World Youth Day. “Anybody who waits for immediate results from a World Youth Day in the six-months afterwards, or are expecting the churches are going to be populated immediately will be terribly let down.”
Father Rosica said WYD reinvigorates the Church in ways that become apparent over time.
“We look for the deeper signs of the effect of World Youth Day,” he told Vatican Radio. “That is a reinvigorated young adult ministry, pastoral ministry for young people, university chaplaincies, renewed vocations: An awareness that the Church is alive and the Church is young, as Pope Benedict said so beautifully in his inauguration.”
One other concrete result was the establishment of Salt + Light Television, Canada’s first national Catholic television network. After the success of World Youth Day, Father Rosica was also asked to take charge of this new enterprise.
“I thought my work was done after World Youth Day. I wanted to go away, hibernate, and take a long sabbatical,” he said.
“The more I look at it now in hindsight and also with the eyes of faith, retrospection, and providence, it was God’s way of saying the Church is alive and the Church is young, because the spirit of World Youth Day has continued in Salt + Light,” he told Vatican Radio.
The next World Youth Day will be in 2013 in Rio de Janeiro.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/02/2012 19:51]