Reverberations after B16’s flight
The pope has returned to Rome after World Youth Day in Australia and is preparing to take off for a bit of summer vacation.
But there are plenty of repercussions from that event, which seems to happen everywhere Benedict XVI goes.
Kathryn Jean Lopez calls attention to the message of youth celebrating like this in the first place.
The Daily Telegraph says the results of a poll show Sydney loved the pope and the youth. (Did that really require a poll?)
This blog down in Oz was impressed.
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.
And they pay him an affectionate compliment.
In the vernacular of the land, the Pope seemed to become, if not a superstar, a fair dinkum good bloke.
The media have been falling for him, in spite of themselves.
Colleen Carroll Campbell makes the point that they generally start paying more attention when he talks about matters like environmentalism.
Given that no lobby is more fashionable or feted today than the environmental movement, it’s unsurprising that so many pundits consider Benedict’s eco-consciousness his best quality. Many of the same critics who once panned him as the “Panzer Cardinal” for his theological orthodoxy now hail Benedict as “the green pope.”
That makes all the headlines, certainly.
Most news accounts said that Benedict made environmental protection a key theme of his World Youth Day remarks. But anyone who read Benedict’s address knew that his environmental references came in the context of criticism of societies where protecting children from pornography or defending the sanctity of human life takes a back seat to hugging trees and saving spotted owls.
In speaking to the young, Benedict acknowledged their concerns about the degradation of the natural environment but reminded them that “the social environment — the habitat we fashion for ourselves” also has scars. Among them are “the exaltation of violence and sexual degradation” in media and entertainment and the materialistic mentality that tempts us to spend our lives acquiring things rather than virtues.
Benedict especially lamented the failure to “recognize that the innate dignity of every individual rests on his or her deepest identity — as image of the Creator — and therefore that human rights are universal, based on the natural law.”
That’s the takeaway message he asked the hundreds of thousands of youth there, and those watching around the world, to take into their communities as “prophets” of a new “new age.”