Continuing the 'reviews' lookback to WYD Sydney in 2008......
Here is a great post-WYD editorial from .
Hallelujah and Thank You to whoever wrote it - he/she just very simply gets it - the message of WYD and the Pope's participation - and gets it right, as the secular media rarely do; and to The Australian editors for taking such an unequivocal stand in the face of the 'secularist sneering' of the Australian intellectual establishment.
Pilgrims renew an ancient faith
Editorial
July 21, 2008
We salute World Youth Day's organisers for bringing such an exciting, uplifting event Down Under.
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.
United by faith,
surrounded by beauty
by Father Raymond J. de Souza
Published: Thursday, July 24, 2008
SYDNEY, Australia -'It was beautiful!" More than anything else, that's what I heard from the pilgrims who came here last week for World Youth Day (WYD), the massive Catholic pilgrimage which Toronto hosted in 2002.
I was struck by that, because the great success of Sydney 2008 could have given rise to any number of adjectives -- it was enormous, it was exciting, it was emotional, it was inspiring, it was transforming, it was exhausting. Yet repeatedly people chose to describe it as beautiful.
It was. There was the natural beauty of the Sydney Harbour, used to great effect for some of the set-piece events -- the opening Mass, the papal arrival and the dramatic presentation of the Stations of the Cross. The early sunset of the Sydney winter added an evocative celestial glow.
There was also the beauty of Sydney's architectural wonders -- the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and St. Mary's Cathedral-- as well as the downtown parks and waterways.
One of the popular places of prayer was a new painting -- very contemporary, very Australian -- of the Madonna and Child in the cathedral.
There was the beauty, too, of the liturgy, evidence that Pope Benedict's lead is being followed in reawakening the beauty of the Catholic tradition. There were the young people, too, who in their wholesomeness and enthusiasm were beautiful to behold -- even after a long march and overnight campout.
All of which is a reminder that in the history of philosophy, particularly medieval philosophy, beauty was considered to be, alongside truth and goodness, one of the necessary attributes of reality.
Something that was as it was supposed to be would be true, beautiful and good. Truth, beauty and goodness would attract us to that which was real and, eventually, to that which was most real, the source of all being, all reality, God.
Today, we usually associate the things of God with the moral life -- goodness. If we say someone is "godly" we usually mean that he is morally good and lives the virtues. Truth, too, is associated with discovering God, as we can see in the debates about what faith and reason, religion and science can tell us about what is most real.
Beauty is neglected. We consider beauty to be so subjective -- it is in the eye of the beholder -- that it can only tell us something about ourselves, and nothing about reality as it is. Beauty so conceived leads us only inward, not beyond ourselves to the transcendent.
Yet beauty retains its power. Consider natural wonders. Saint Augustine asked of them: "Who made these beautiful changing things if not one who is beautiful and changeth not?"
Man-made beauty, too, can be an encounter with the transcendent. Such is the purpose of great art and music. A WYD highlight was the Sydney Symphony performing Beethoven's
Missa Solemnis at the Opera House. The music and the physical setting -- both the Opera House and the Harbour -- did not provide an argument about God, or an example of the goodness of divine providence, but rather
an encounter with beauty which points beyond itself.
Authentic beauty is a meeting with reality and the God who is most real.
"Life is not just a succession of events or experiences, helpful though many of them are," said Pope Benedict last week. "It is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this -- in truth, in goodness and in beauty -- that we find happiness and joy. Do not be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty and subjective experience displaces truth."
In contrasting novelty and beauty, Benedict was indicating that beauty has an enduring quality. World Youth Day is a new thing, and it abounds in novelties -- papal text messages, a dedicated social networking site and blogging pilgrims this time round.
In Sydney we discovered that beauty is still valid and compelling for a new generation. Where arguments may fail and goodness may be lacking, the encounter of beautiful things may draw us onward to God.
The young pilgrims cheered the symphony quite unlike the usual crowds at the Opera House. The maestro appeared quite overwhelmed. They were cheering him to be sure, but also something greater -- the One who made such beautiful music possible, and the One for whom it was performed.
A fair dinkum Pope
Editorial
Thu, 24 Jul 2008
Sydney certainly knows how to throw a party.
The extraordinary scenes played out on the city's streets over the course of the World Youth Day week, and relayed on television screens for huge world audiences, or reported in newspapers or on radio bulletins, have been in some respects reminiscent of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
In other ways they have surpassed them. For this was a party quite unlike any other: five days and nights of peace, love and Christianity, enjoyed by young pilgrims from around the world; no alcohol, little trouble, barely even a hint of disorder.
To cap it all, the crowd at Sunday morning's Mass at Randwick Racecourse swelled to an estimated 350,000.
So it had been during a week of festivities for the faithful presided over by Pope Benedict XVI and labelled by some the Church's version of Woodstock.
The music was certainly there, with more than 165 concerts staged; but so were the prayer meetings, the Masses, the addresses by other Catholic luminaries, the staging of the Stations of the Cross - said to have been televised to an audience of 500 million - and the centre-stage role of the Pope himself.
In the wash-up to this remarkable gathering, perhaps aided and abetted by the sort of relaxed friendliness and ambience that so becomes our Australian cousins, it is being said that in Sydney the Pope began, finally, to reveal the hallmarks of his papacy.
To date, he has been, possibly unfairly, characterised by the most pronounced public qualities of his former self: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a cool and austere intellectual German theologian - and an arch-conservative one at that.
But in the company of so many tens of thousands of smiling young pilgrims, and blessed by five days of clement Sydney winter sun, he reportedly showed a sense of humour and common humanity, allied to a genuine personal warmth. There were even flashes of charisma.
In the vernacular of the land, the Pope seemed to become, if not a superstar, a fair dinkum good bloke.
But World Youth Day 2008 was not simply a prayer party. There were serious matters for the Pontiff to attend to, not least the legacy of sexual abuse which he has inherited. Such "misdeeds, which constitute so grave a betrayal of trust, deserve unequivocal condemnation", he said.
He was "deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured", and said that those responsible for "these evils" must be brought to justice.
For some, understandably, this apology will not have gone far enough; for others it went further than the Pope appeared to have gone before, but if the 81-year-old Pope was intent on addressing the sins of the past, he also had his sights clearly on the future - and the challenges and problems facing the young people who had gathered to hear him.
In the homily of the Randwick Mass he alluded to the cults of individualism and consumerism, calling for his audience to instead embrace the "underground river" of Christian values that would help provide firm foundations.
At a more secular level he called on world faiths and religions to unite in combating "sinister and indiscriminate violence".
And his farewell from Australia was marked by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's announcement of a resident ambassador to the Holy See in Rome, in the form of former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer - denoting a deepening of Australia's relationship with the Vatican.
"It will," said Mr Rudd, "allow Australia to expand dialogue with the Vatican in areas including human rights, political and religious freedom, food security, arms control, refugees and people trafficking."
To this he might have added issues that continue to worry many Catholics and non-Catholics alike: contraception, especially in the Third World, the celibacy of the priesthood, the role of women in the Church, and so on.
[Typically secular POV, which does not recognize that every religion has - or should have - certain non-negotiable principles, open to question by many certainly, including not a few Catholics, but for all that, not mutable at all. And Rudd, raised a Catholic, has the common sense to keep that in mind.]
Those are issues that will continue to be debated, including by many of the young people present in Sydney.
Whatever one's personal views or faith, and how they impact on these matters, there can be less debate about the significance of the World Youth Day 2008: for vast numbers of young people from greatly differing cultures and backgrounds, there are common values to be found in the Church and its teachings.
In a world that so often sees itself as hopelessly fractured, driven by difference and intolerance, rather than compassion and hope, that in itself is cause for celebration.
Before he took it on himself to pick out the highlights of Pope Benedict XVI's discourses in Sydney (which he published in his Chiesa rubric two days ago, as posted in the SYDNEY thread of this Forum), Sandro Magister was interviewed by an online journal during which he sang the praises of the Holy Father unequivocally as he generally does.
The Pope who enchants the youth
by bringing them the essence
of the Christian faith
An interview with Sandro Magister
Translated from
www. ilsussidiario.net
July 21, 2008
To say weighty things which are understandable even to simple people, to the point of calling the entire Bible the great love story between God and man culminating in Mary's Yes to the angel: this blend of intellectual profundity and communicative clarity is what veteran Vatican reporter Sandro Magister identifies as the originality of this Pope, who in Sydney proved once more that he can enchant hundreds of thousands of younpeople.
Benedict XVI began his participation in last week's World Youth Day speaking of a world that is threatened by an idea of human freedom that is detached from reality. He said this referring to creation, the world God created, but also to the threats to human life by human acts like abortion. It seemed like a synthesis almost of disparate elements and subjects
It is with such a chain of arguments that Benedict XVI has effectively answered a recurrent objection. Both the secular world and a part of the Catholic world have criticized the preaching of the Catholic hierarchy, particularly the Pope, for being too insistent on the issues of defense of life and the family, and not paying enough attention, in their opinion, to emergencies like the environment and that which one might call the social ecology.
The Pope has shown that these different fields are absolutely linked - one cannot be consistent by defending one in preference to the other.
What is the foundation of this synthesis in the Pope's reasoning?
It is the plan of creation that he shows and illustrates in his preaching - with man as the summit of creation. Man is in the image of God, and is therefore the quintessence of creation as a whole.
And thus defending human life already encompassesa the inescapable commitment to defend all other aspects of creation.
The Pope made time in Sydney to meet the representatives of other Christian confessions and non-Christian religions. He spoke of a 'critical juncture' in the ecumenical dialog. What did he mean?
Many commentators have interpreted this as a reference to the situation of the Anglican Communion. But reading the Pope's address in its entirety, his reference to a 'critical juncture' was more general: he was expressing his concern for the tendency to find fault with those doctrines that each Christian confession professes as the basis for its identity.
Thus the Pope has denounced a current of thinking that is quite widespread, according to which, in order to arrive at Christian reunification, doctrinal differences must be set aside - or at least, considered secondary - as if these don't count enough. Whereas he underscores that one cannot conceive of ecumenical dialog that is not an ecumenism of truth. This insistence on truth is really the hallmark of this Pontificate, and these days have confirmed it yet again.
Madrid has been chosen to host the next WYD - a significant choice in view of the situation in Spain...
This choice was already in the air, and it was predictable that after holding WYD in a place far from Europe, it would come back some place nearer. Certainly, the choice of Madrid in particular implies a new challenge and appeal to old Europe, which may be considered Christianity's firstborn in the world, but where the Church now finds itself in remarkable difficulties. Spain in particular is emblematic of the problems that the Church is facing in Europe and in the West, in general.
Yet another time, the Pope has belied - if indeed there was still need to - the image of a professor Pope who is remote from the sensibility of the youth. What is the secret of Benedict XVI's communicative ability which always amazes?
This ability to communicate with young people is part of his ability in general to communicate with all people of whatever age and whatever cultural background. Every day simply confirms more that this is a Pope who was not made only for the academies but who is able to say weighty things to simple people in simple words.
Of course, these words are very rich and dense in significance, certainly not 'easy' in the unfavorable sense, But he is able to say important things to persons who do not need to have academic degrees to be able to listen to him and understand him. And it is true that this Pope always surprises anew in this regard. The stakes are much higher with young people, but he always carries it off.
His very choice of the Holy Spirit as the focus for this WYD already meant he would speak to them of difficult concepts. The Holy Spirit is not an easy subject...
The two major addresses were frankly of an astounding density. The address at the vigil, dedicated specially to the Holy Spirit - the 'forgotten person' of the Trinity, as he said - was truly a catechism lesson of great depth, in which he did not hesitate to cite St. Augustine, and following his example, develop a lesson on the importance and meaning of the Holy Spirit.
Then he spoke of the sacraments of Christian initiation in a way that we can call mystagogic: he made clear how the Sacraments are the way to come closer - and in ever greater depth - to the fact of Christianity.
And he did this very simply before a seemingly endless crowd of young people, saying these things as if he were speaking face to face with each one of them, without once descending in the least to linguistic compromises or dumbing it down to engage their attention.
In your opinion, what do you think was the highest point of Benedict XVI's communicative power at WYD?
The Angelus message, clearly written at one go by the Pope, which was an effective exposition so amazing that it even left me speechless. He put together the Old and New Testaments through the perspective of Our Lady's Yes to the angel of the Annunciation, presenting the Old Testament as the story of a long courtship, of a love story between man and God, and the New Testament as the marriage which crowns it, after Mary says Yes to his proposal.
And then he added that if this were like any other story, we could say 'and they lived happily ever after', but he points out that on the contrary, the story does not end there, it only starts with Mary's Yes, and is a story that continues to demand our commitment day after day.
A Pope who can express his ideas that way is certainly not the cut-and-dried professor that everyone - arbitrarily - expected he would be.
Doesn't all that bring back a flood of euphorious nostalgia and overwhelming love for the Pope of our everlasting affections?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/08/2013 20:28]