Hopalong Cassidy and John Paul

By RICK SALUTIN
Friday, July 26, 2002

My first question about World Youth Day is: Why is it news? Why did Peter Mansbridge time his vacation to it? It's a convention. Anchors don't tailor their holidays to the Shriners when they're in town. (And, believe me, they're disruptive, too.) It even has a job fair. This did not strike me -- normally, if everyone treats it as news, one assumes it is -- till I heard a CBC radio report from the streets on Tuesday. The reporter said pilgrims were streaming to Exhibition Place, waving to others on streetcars, but some were anxious to find their billets, showing the address to passersby, who then directed them how to get there. That was the punch line! On the other hand, maybe it's just -- as the old journalists say -- a great July story.

I have been irked by commentaries that claim the event proves the need for religion and meaning is still alive. That is always the line. Religions constantly insist they're not dead yet, even when no one says they are. Alberta academic Reginald Bibby says his polling shows we all "have spiritual interests and needs." Yeehaw. He got a positive response when he asked inactive Catholics, "Would you consider the possibility of being more involved if you found it to be worthwhile?" That ranks beside, Would you like to pay lower taxes? on the list of silliest poll questions. Austrian theologian Paul Zulehner says Europe is undergoing "a boom in religious yearning" even though the churches are shrinking. John O'Sullivan adds in the National Post that we may be in "a phase that the prosperous go through before arriving at a sense of religious awe at the mysteries of Creation." Ergo, religion will come roaring back, if it ever left.

Let me humbly say that this all puts the religious cart way before the spiritual horse. Humans are meaning-seeking entities. They respond to awe and mystery. Organized religions are simply one way of trying to meet those needs, just as economic systems -- feudalism, capitalism, socialism -- are ways of satisfying underlying and ongoing material needs. When the first humans saw the sun set for the first time, they were filled with dread, then with gratitude when it rose again. The impulse predates and may well survive organized religions.

Perhaps I should confess something in the, um, spirit of the week. I am encouraged in this by the model of Post columnist Rebecca Eckler, also a non-Catholic, who rose to the challenge and went to confession-by-the lake. (" 'Are you Catholic?' 'No. Does that matter?' 'Yes, it is reserved for Catholics.' Phew. We just saved about four hours.") I, too, was a teen religionist and, though I didn't retain the connection, I still have sympathy and admiration for it. I don't think of those common adolescent bouts with religion as simply part of a phase of youthful idealism, which will inevitably vanish. I'd call adolescence, instead, a privileged state in which you first grow aware that you are part of more than your family or peer group; you belong to your society, to history, even to the cosmos (with related "religious" feelings). You realize you, too, can make your contribution. No wonder the Pope and other duffers say they are inspired by "the youth"; it's so easy to lose the freshness of those connections.

That's why I find the leitmotif of World Youth Day -- a stress on the person of the Pope -- disturbing: It undermines that emergent adolescent sense of autonomy and control. It's no more attractive than any modern personality cult: Chinese youth waving copies of Mao-thought, for instance. This isn't inevitable, even in the Catholic Church; I'm talking about tone and emphasis, not doctrine. "I just want to see the Pope. I think he's like, a hero," said a 14-year-old. "All my life I've wanted to see the Pope and now I will," said a 27-year-old. Come to think of it, I met Hopalong Cassidy at Exhibition Place when I was about 7. He was a hero, too.

One trouble with personality cults is you never get near enough to have a real sense of the person, so you fill in with projections, aided by drooling columnists and hangers-on. It's all so selective. I mean, why does this Pope get maximum credit for making it down the steps from the plane and virtually none for the clutch of nasties he's put in charge of his church almost everywhere he had a chance, including multicultural Toronto, where Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic told a gathering of youth this week, in the midst of a backlash against Muslims and a resurgence of anti-Semitism, not to be taken in by "the politically correct tolerance which imagines that all religions and convictions and values are equally valid."