A different ‘new age’

The largest gathering in the history of Australia was the Sunday morning Mass at Randwick racetrack outside Sydney celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI for about 400,000 participants.

It was another wildly successful World Youth Day.

Watching it, I remembered a call once on radio while covering the period of time between John Paul II’s final days and the conclave and election of Benedict. Callers were amazed at how caught up the press was, even big elite media, with the Church and orthodoxy and the respectful focus of world attention on Rome. And the masses of young people. One caller asked “Is it just my impression, or is it suddenly cool to be Catholic?!”

For some, it always was. For others, yes, it has become cooler.

Seems like that’s spreading.

After years of being booed offstage, the curtains have again opened and God is being greeted with tumultuous applause. As a young woman commenting the event on Australian TV said, with unabashed confidence, it used not to be “trendy” to be a Catholic in Sydney, but now “it’s become cool again”.

Good to hear when the media ‘get it’, because for years under John Paul II they just didn’t know how to deal with WYD.

Some baffled journalists described it as a Catholic Woodstock – the 1969 orgy of, drugs and sex and rock ‘n roll which became an iconic moment for baby-boomers. But 40 years later, the world has moved in an unexpected direction. WYD, the biggest youth event in history, is an anti-Woodstock, a repudiation of the materialism and secularism of the baby-boomers.

That’s what connects young people most with the pope, his clear exhortation to be counter-cultural trailblazers for truth. And truth excites. Especially when it’s rarely heard.

This resonated:

“In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.” He constantly attributed this to the scourge of relativism, the belief that there is no truth. Instead, people are offered mere “experiences” with no standard by which to judge them.

Profound message, really.

And to young people, over and over again, he emphasised their responsibility to pass on their faith to others. He called upon them to be prophets of a new society: “a new age in which love 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. A new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deaden our souls and poison our relationships.”

Read Michael Cook’s whole piece, it’s loaded with hope.