Pope embraces communal spirit

John Paul's Toronto pilgrimage in July will be enveloped in symbolism, MICHAEL VALPY says

By MICHAEL VALPY, the Globe and Mail
Saturday, May 18, 2002

The Pope, health permitting -- his 82nd birthday is today, and the news media are solemnly cataloguing his afflictions and incapacities, and weighing whether he will resign -- is expected in Toronto on July 27 and 28 as the superstar attraction at the Roman Catholic Church's eighth biennial World Youth Day gathering.

He is to join hundreds of thousands of young Catholics from around the world in an overnight vigil in the city's Downsview park and then celebrate a public mass the next morning for an anticipated one million people.

The questions in a 21st-century, secular and anti-institutional world are why World Youth Days attract as many young people as they do -- one million in Paris in 1997, more than two million in Rome in 2000 -- and what dynamic they unleash.

Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic, Archbishop of Toronto, said in an interview that World Youth Days reach back to a Christianity that is largely pre-Vatican II (the church's great reforming council in 1965) and almost pre-Enlightenment.

They are pilgrimages, communal spiritual experiences, he said, and they are very much a theological creation of John Paul.

He said his own visit to the 1993 WYD in Denver "was a very useful corrective to my own theology.

"I found these young people living in their own world of symbols. These young people brought to me the reality of people needing one another, of seeking the communal, loving large crowds, something I don't pay much attention to.

"For me, the abstractions are important. The postconciliar [post-Vatican II] tendency has been heavily influenced by theologians [who favour] a kind of individualist approach . . . with insufficient attention paid to human community.

"Our postconciliar theological training in the seminaries and my own graduate-student training is analytic. It atrophies the sense of the symbolic. My sense of the symbolic was diminished."

To illustrate, he told a theological joke: In postconciliar theology, Jesus's parable of the prodigal son would be presented as a lecture on pig farming. In other words, the symbolism would be lost, and instead there would be analysis of what the prodigal son did when he went out in the fields to feed the swine.

He told a story of the symbolic that, he said, deeply touched him -- of visiting, on a weekday morning, an Indian town on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, and finding the church full of women with babies. "It was a presentation of babies, a feast of presentation."

Michael Higgins, president of St. Jerome's University in Waterloo and a scholar of the contemporary Catholic Church, agrees with the cardinal.

Vatican II, he said, contributed to a radical diminishing of a very important feature of Catholic spiritual life. "The preconciliar church delighted in the senses. The postconciliar church is shockingly analytic with a barren inner landscape."

The church of the senses relished popular devotions -- the rosary, visiting the stations of the cross, holding religious processions, venerating the saints. "It celebrated its icons," Prof. Higgins said.

Those who attend World Youth Days relish processions and mass events, public discussions of faith. In contrast, Cardinal Ambrozic said, postconciliar faith is inclined to be seen as a private matter.

He likened WYD participants to a choir. "There are very few soloists," he said, "but put them together and they sing beautifully." The number of applications for the priesthood shows a sharp increase afterward.

Cardinal Ambrozic says events such as World Youth Days are an understandable reaction to postconciliar cerebralism. "No one trend does entire justice to the richness of the faith."

Prof. Higgins said John Paul papacy will be considered one of the great pontificates of history, despite some of the political problems such as the U.S. sex scandal, precisely because he can communicate "a remarkable authenticity" of spiritual depth and spiritual joy to the members of his church.

If the Pope is too frail to make the trip, it is expected the Toronto WYD organizers will wait until the last moment to say so. It's his presence that attracts young people to the gatherings, and the registrations to date (about 200,000) remain well below the 500,000 to 750,000 that were once anticipated.

The Pope has Parkinson's disease and knee and hip ailments.