The Vatican's press corps impressed by 'normal kids'

By MICHAEL VALPY, RELIGION AND ETHICS REPORTER, The Globe and Mail
Monday, July 29, 2002

That's the conclusion from the Vatican press corps, the small group of Rome-based journalists who travel wherever the Pope travels and have been to all or most of the church's World Youth Days dating back to 1985.

"I was telling my wife on the phone last night about the kids," said Victor Simpson of Associated Press, the press corps dean. "I like the kids more this time.

"There were a lot of normal kids. It was a nice little touch of innocence. The kids were very refreshing. They showed their enthusiasm without being silly."

In other venues, specifically in Europe, he said, the kids were dour.

More than half the young people registered for Toronto World Youth Day were Canadians and Americans, scrubbed North Americans.

Philip Pullella of Reuters said Toronto came closest to the 1993 World Youth Day in Denver, largely because of the kids. "They're North American kids."

Both Mr. Simpson and Mr. Pullella talked about the high degree of organization behind the Toronto event -- comparable, Mr. Pullella said, to Denver.

"Rome [in 2000] was a nightmare," Mr. Simpson said.

"The organization [in Toronto] was very efficient," Mr. Pullella said. "There was very little left to the imagination" -- in contrast, he said, to many other World Youth Days where much was left to the last moment and often no one knew what was going to happen.

But Mr. Pullella also said the event in Toronto had less of an international flavour than most other World Youth Days because it's very expensive to get to Canada. When World Youth Day is in Europe, "Europeans can drive or take the train or bus or even walk -- a lot of people walked to Rome [in 2000] from northern Italy. There's also a tradition of going on religious pilgrimages, which doesn't exist in North America."

The World Youth Day format is by and large cookie-cutter: opening mass, papal welcome, catechesis sessions (instructions in the faith), stations of the cross, vigil, final papal mass.

Several members of the Vatican press corps said the stations of the cross in Toronto was an unparallelled spectacular performance.