Religion's death greatly exaggerated

By REX MURPHY
Saturday, July 27, 2002

If the question Time posed as long ago as 1966 is still perplexing its editorial board, one hopes they had a bevy of correspondents in Toronto this week. Given that Gary Condit is not in the news, and Cher is not scheduled for any new surgeries, it's possible there were.

If the Time cover had any utility, beyond boosting the circulation of the magazine that week, it may have been that it nudged thousands of people into giving at least casual thought to the topics of God, religion and the concept of faith. This is not a normal "chase list" of journalism.

These topics are larger than the attention that journalism usually gives them. They are also deeper than most of what journalism takes as its beat. Journalism, as its name betrays, is of the concerns of the day; religion, faith are not so much outside any news cycle, as beyond one. They are the subject matter of eternity.

There are no updates -- there is no date to up -- on Enron in eternity, which may be a powerful reason why so many people pine for it. Eternity is not an absence of news, so much as the impossibility of it.

But back to time, I mean Time. It may want to rewrite that famous cover. World Youth Day being celebrated in Toronto this week may be in its sponsorship unidenominational -- a Roman Catholic event. But it has called to people from more countries than an Olympics.

And what has lured them to make the effort and spend the time?

Let's put it in its barest form for the sake of greatest clarity: These very young people came to see a very old man and hear him preach to them. In the context of this hyperstimulated age, were I comfortable with the term, I'd call that a miracle.

What I am very comfortable calling it is a rebuke to the idea that religion -- mainstream, mainline religion -- is a dormant or a moribund presence in the lives of Western people.

For a very great number, God has never carried a question mark.

Time's cover, then or now, can be seen mainly as an impertinence perpetrated by ignorance. To massage the words of a gloriously hearty agnostic, Mark Twain, reports of His death have been greatly overreported.

A lot of the dynamism of the people visiting Toronto has, of course, to do with the man, who in a Catholic understanding, is Christ's representative on Earth. Even without those credentials, John Paul II is a marvellous example of leadership and humanity.

If there is such a thing as charisma, as we have learned to use that term in our age, then John Paul II must have been baptized in it. Anyone watching television on Thursday afternoon during his first formal Youth Day appearance, and especially anyone catching some of the shots of particular faces in the crowd, had to have been astonished at how the Pope's presence so charged and even overwhelmed great numbers of them.

An old man in a chair, in the year 2002, reads an update of the Sermon on the Mount to 200,000-plus young people, and one half is in tears while the other half can't stop cheering. It was a demonstration of prodigious charisma.

Those who criticize John Paul II, or his tenure as Pope, for turning the papacy into something of a celebrity machine have it all wrong, upside down. The rock stars and prefabricated celebrities of the big screen or the small box are a mere parody of real charisma. They rent charisma.

The appeal of John Paul II to young people in particular proceeds from substance. It begins in what he believes, gathers strength in how he believes, and is immensely amplified by his simple example. Conviction is an attractive quality in itself, but conviction allied to service is irresistible.

Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic of Toronto referred to political correctness in his early address to the Youth Day celebrations. John Paul II is the most politically incorrect leader on the world stage. He is, according to most progressive opinion, on the wrong side of every right topic. He is the patriarch of the world's longest-standing hierarchy, the very antimatter of feminism, a man who has set his teeth against every "modernist" reform. In the views of some, to call him Neanderthal would be an insult to the cave dweller. He is gorgeously, consummately, politically incorrect.

And it doesn't matter a drat. There is something stronger than fashion, and deeper than intellectual trendiness in the man, a clarity that doesn't genuflect to the times. For the crown of John Paul's charisma is, by his lights, that it doesn't flow from himself at all. It is the property of his religious faith -- the conviction, to reverse Time's formulation -- that God is life.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.