Worldly travel aids spiritual journey
By ALANNA MITCHELL, The Globe and Mail
July 23, 2002
The first time Isabel Correa had a chance to leave Montreal on a pilgrimage to see the Pope, she didn't see why she should bother. Grudgingly, she changed her mind at the last minute and joined about 600,000 other young people in Denver, in 1993, at one of the World Youth Day events.
She was 19 at the time, raised Catholic but not practising. Now, at 28, she has devoted her life to the church. She has degrees in mathematics and education, and has worked with young people in Nicaragua. In September, she will start training to be a novice, the first step toward becoming a nun.
"Back in 1993," she said, "I would have said: 'Are you kidding? No way! No way!' Now I say: 'Okay, God, you've got me.' "
Her experience is what the Roman Catholic Church would consider a World Youth Day home run. WYD, the brainchild of John Paul II and a small group of his closest advisers, is part of a multifaceted campaign to pull young people from around the world into the Roman Catholic faith. It has been held every two years since 1987 (WYD 1999 was delayed until 2000).
While the church has spent enormous amounts of energy on attracting the young since the third century, the eight WYD events have had a decidedly modern flavour. In fact, they are carefully choreographed to appeal to the psychological quests of modern youth.
On the most obvious level, tuning up Catholicism for young people means plugging into their relatively recent ability to travel quickly. The plan involves inviting young people to gather in places that feed their wanderlust. The two previous WYDs, for example, took place in Paris and Rome.
"Something about the travelling is very attractive to the psychology of young people," said Sister Francine Guilmette, the associate director of Toronto's World Youth Day. "There is the urge to go discover, to go someplace else."
The events also are designed to be easy on the pocketbook. Instead of going as free-spending tourists, the young Catholics come as pilgrims. They eschew luxury, staying with local families and eating family meals. They walk for hours a day in the heat and rain, a physical reminder of the difficult spiritual journey they are on.
It has, and is designed to have, all the cachet of a gloriously counter-cultural experience, albeit one carefully controlled by one of the world's oldest and most socially conservative institutions. WYD invites the young to respond to the power of the church's vast history and myth, while leaving behind its more tragic mistakes.
More than that, it has to appeal to the emotions as well as the intellect. This generation does not want the intricate logical arguments of the Enlightenment, preferring instead some of the more intuitive values of the medieval church.
"Sometimes I feel almost like we're going backward, to that whole time of the first 1,400 years of the church," Sister Francine said, adding that "at World Youth Day, they experience the church in a non-rigid, non-intellectual way."
In fact, the WYD phenomenon carries strong echoes of the early church, said Roger Reynolds, a professor at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto.
For one thing, it falls squarely within the church's long history of appealing to the young. "The church isn't going to grow unless it brings in young people," Prof. Reynolds said. "That goes right back to patristic times. . . . It's a very, very old tradition in the church to get youth enthusiastic about their faith."
Many of the favourite martyrs of the medieval church, for example, were hot-headed teens killed for refusing to bow to the emperor of the day. The teen martyrs were then remembered in magnificent celebrations, such as the Jan. 22 feast of St. Agnes, which brought communities, regions or even nations together to display their faith.
"Young people do have a great deal more ardour in their belief than older people," Prof. Reynolds said.
As well, the ancient church targeted every child from birth. That took the form of baptism and the assigning of godparents, who were given the task of training the child in the faith's primary documents, known officially in the medieval church as catechesis. World Youth Day has a large dollop of catechesis as well, set out as part of the formal program.
The Roman Catholic Church has rigorously taught its beliefs also by educating children through church-controlled school systems in many parts of the world. Ironically, though, organizers believe one of the main reasons the World Youth Day events can attract the young is that, for the first time in hundreds of years, this generation has little personal knowledge about the rules of churchgoing.
They may have been educated at Roman Catholic schools, but, unlike many of their parents and grandparents, they don't necessarily carry a negative view of priests and nuns. WYD organizers take great pains to position the event as a sign the church can start fresh.
"The church can say: 'Here's Jesus Christ,' " Sister Francine said. "We are not preaching an institution. We are preaching a person. It's an integration of the intellectual and emotional worlds."
But Vatican research also has shown that the biggest up-front draw is the Holy Father himself. John Paul II has become a celebrity to this generation of young people in the West. That's because he is seen as such a martyr to his ailments, and because fame has a powerful grip on modern society.
"The Pope is the Beatles of the age," said Liz Chappel, executive-director of the Ontario Multifaith Council. She met some young people recently who told her it was their life's dream to meet the Pope. "They could hardly talk, they were so excited."
Rather than accepting the Pope as the infallible teacher of God's word, the young tend to see him as an icon, said David Reed, a professor of theology at the University of Toronto's Wycliffe College. He has studied the religious movements of the young.
"They don't relate to him as a teacher of faith, but as an icon or symbol," Prof. Reed said. "That's just a part of the way this generation relates to authority."
By all accounts, the Pope is willing to play into this trend, in a wholesale sprint to introduce the next generation of parishioners to the Roman Catholic Church. He has prided himself on being the pope who cherishes the young.
"Sometimes I'm asking myself, 'How did he get these marvellous intuitions?' " Sister Francine said.
If the young are to have time for a church, it must be one that accepts them, not one that treats them as a client or an interloper, Sister Francine said. That means the message must be high-minded.
Prof. Reed said he believes the WYD event is a natural fit for the young whose thirst for spirituality is strong, just as it has been strong in that age-group for millennia. They want to feel part of something big.
"They are not questioning: 'Is there a God?' " said Prof. Reed. "They're asking: 'Will the real God stand up?' "
The Catholic church and the evangelical Protestant churches, Prof. Reed said, have done the best job of trying to keep young people in the fold. Mainstream Protestant churches have failed miserably for the better part of two generations, the average age of a Canadian Anglican, for instance is 58.
"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what [the Anglican] church will be like in 25 years," he said. "It will be one great big religious nursing home."
Mainline Protestant churches are only starting to do what Catholics have been doing for years. Now, for the first time in recent memory, they are clamouring to hire youth ministers, Prof. Reed said.
But will WYD really work? Is it a launching pad for a generation of powerful church and secular leaders such as Ms. Correa, or will the event vanish without a trace once the Pope goes home? Perhaps the young participants are just undertaking the spiritual version of a trip to Graceland.
Prof. Reed said it's almost impossible to tell. But he pointed out that even with all the blows the church has sustained in recent years, including the sex-abuse scandals, Catholics continue to identify with the faith. That suggests something is helping to shore it up.
In Quebec, for example, where even marriage among Ms. Correa's generation is repudiated, and few attend church regularly, the sense of being Catholic remains extremely high, he said.
Even those who doubt World Youth Day has spiritual legs acknowledge one fundamental truth: The Pope asked young people to come, and they did.
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Copyright © 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc.
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