Forget s-x abuse scandals, bouts of flu and gastro, traffic hold-ups and the rest. The big takeout from last week’s celebrations is that “faith is fun”.
World Youth Day (WYD) has re-positioned the Catholic Church, two millennia old, as alive and well and relevant to a whole new generation of enthusiastic adherents, millions of them, around the world.
That’s a remarkable achievement.
Christianity, especially in the West, has been under severe attack for some years now from atheist crusaders like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens (God is not great: How religion poisons everything) and, closer to home, Phillip Adams (Adams vs God).
At face value, the Church should be out of date and on the way out. Celibacy, all-male hierarchies, opposition to birth control, abhorrence of homos-xuality, miracles, intelligent design — it’s all stuff that sits so oddly with the ordinary values of contemporary society.
But through all this, the Catholic Church, like the British monarchy, has shown a remarkable ability to reinvent itself and stay relevant while holding on to the age-old traditions that act like a security blanket for many people.
Part of the trick, of course, is the old Roman idea of ‘bread and circuses’. The Catholic Church is, after all, a vestige of the old Roman Empire from which it borrowed much of its administrative structure.
WYD is a bloody good show. Hundreds of thousands of young people from all over the world having fun without drugs or alcohol provides remarkable images in a media that is otherwise saturated with all that alcopop binge horror epidemic stuff. Those WYD pictures are the most hopeful we’ve seen for quite a while.
The Pope also got his political messages right. He congratulated the Rudd Government on national sorry day, he positioned the Church beautifully on climate change and he handled the s-x abuse problem with great skill.
Moreover, the Pope played straight to the Church’s strength. He spoke out against materialism and urged people to lead ‘deeper’ lives.
A few decades ago, in the midst of the biggest surge in material well-being in human history, only hippies and other crackpots talked along these lines but now it is a mainstream community concern.
Nevertheless, few people are ready to embrace poverty and a life of self-denial. So the idea that you can be part of the Church and have ‘fun’, and be spiritual at the same time, is a real winner.
Great positioning, great messages, a great show and wildly appealing television images. In PR, it doesn’t get any better than that.
Of course “WYD” is supposed to be good PR.
It is essentially a recruitment drive. A moribund, out-of-touch organistation calling desperately for young men (and women) to take the vow of celibacy and sign up for service. The main message to come out of Ratzinger’s mass yesterday was exactly the same as his previous one in Cologne three years ago, and all of those conducted by his ultra-conservative, but media-astute predecessor. They’re becoming increasingly desperate for priests and do not want to tackle the problem head on – i.e. by dropping the oath of celibacy. The laughable thing is, for every one Roman catholic preist who sticks to his vows, there’s someone who doesn’t. It’s the church’s worst kept secret.
To say that the leaders of the Catholic Church are like the British Monarchy is a slap in the face of Her Majesty. The British Monarchy has moved with the times, admittedly not always willingly, but they have moved. The Monarchy wields power only with the advice of a democratically elected parliament. The Catholic Church invests all power in an un-elected autocracy where no lay people have any real influence over doctrine. Women are even more disenfranchised than men. Her Majesty, as the leader of the Church Of England plays no part in the development of doctrine, and is the simply the figurehead of this organisation which is considerably more catholic regarding the development of ideas than the Catholic Church leaders have ever been.
The froth and bubble of World Youth Day will dissipate quickly. The moribund and obsolete doctrines of the Catholic Chiurch will reamain.
On the surface it was good PR. But those of us with more of a sceptical bent got the heebie jeebies with a personality cult that would make North Korea’s Kim Jong Il blush. One youth commented that seeing the pope was like seeing Jesus Christ in the flesh. Hey? Who is it they worship again?
I was in the middle of Randwick during the Papal Vigil. After the long walk of the afternoon, and a concert atmosphere which persisted, very few of the pilgrims around me were paying much attention to the Pope’s long (but profound) address. At the moment of benediction, however, when the crowd was blessed by the Eucharist, which Catholic believe is the flesh of Christ himself, the chatter stopped, people turned around, and everyone dropped to their knees in prayer. Catholics know whom they worship. It’s non-Catholics who seem to confuse the Pope with some deity.
PS Since when has the Church’s demands EVER been easy or popular? Some people shrugged off Christ too. He didn’t change his teachings then. Why should his Church suddenly go down that road now?