Two million young people from 170 nations—the biggest gathering ever held in Italy—turned out to greet Pope John Paul II yesterday for the Roman Catholic Church’s 15th World Youth Day (WYD), a key event in Catholic celebrations to mark the millennium. The WYD festival began on August 14, and as the celebrations continued in Rome throughout the week, thousands and thousands more young Catholics gathered here. Most came from Italy, although France, Poland, Spain, the United States, the Philippines and Latin America were also well represented. The international media gave massive coverage to the event, hailing it as the “Catholic Woodstock” or “Popestock”, a reference to the huge rock festival that took place in the US in 1969. Journalists from the around the world marveled at the ability of an 80-year-old church leader to attract young people in far bigger numbers than pop stars. The New York Timesdescribed the WYD as “the largest youth gathering ever held in the West”. Only the WYD in Manila in 1995 has drawn a bigger crowd—four million young people.The Italian media said that one reason for the high numbers were the low costs—participants paid only $120 each for food and lodging, and young people from poor countries were not required to pay at all. A spokesman for the Italian bishops said that $3.5 million had been collected before the WYD to help pay for the visitors. However, the young pilgrims had to accept Spartan conditions—sleeping at campsites and in schools. Several thousand were received as guests of Italian families, and 15 young people from various countries were given accommodation at the pope’s summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, 25 kilometers from Rome. On Friday evening (Aug. 18), near the Colosseum, about 500,000 young people took part in the Stations of the Cross, a Catholic rite that follows the various stages of Christ’s crucifixion. On Saturday evening Pope John Paul led a prayer vigil at Tor Vergata, a suburban campus of the University of Rome, where he reminded the hundreds of thousands of people gathered before him of Christ’s question to his Apostles, quoted in Matthew’s Gospel: “But who do you say that I am?” The pope added: “Perhaps you will not have to shed your blood, but you will certainly be asked to be faithful to Christ! A faithfulness to be lived in the circumstances of everyday life.”He continued: “I am thinking of how difficult it is in today’s world for engaged couples to be faithful to purity before marriage; I think too of those who work for peace and who see new outbreaks of war erupt and grow worse in different parts of the world; I think of those who work for human freedom and see people still enslaved to themselves and to one another.”Dear friends,” John Paul concluded in a plea to the young, “at the dawn of the third millennium I see in you the ‘morning watchmen’ [Isaiah 21:11-12]. In the course of the century now past, young people like you were summoned to huge gatherings to learn the ways of hatred; they were sent to fight against one another. The various godless messianic systems which tried to take the place of Christian hope have shown themselves to be truly horrendous.”Today you have come together to declare that in the new century you will not let yourselves be made into tools of violence and destruction. You will defend peace, paying the price in your person if need be.”The WYD festival reached its solemn conclusion with a papal Mass at the Tor Vergata campus yesterday morning, August 20. With thousands upon thousands of young people standing around the altar, the pope said in his homily: “Our society desperately needs this sign [the youth gathering], and young people need it even more so, tempted as they often are by the illusion of an easy and comfortable life, by drugs and pleasure-seeking, only to find themselves in a spiral of despair, meaninglessness and violence.”Quoting the 14th-century’s Saint Catherine of Siena, the pope concluded, to wild applause from the crowd: “If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world ablaze.”Sunday’s Mass took place under a blazing sun, with the temperature reaching 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), while dozens of doctors helped people suffering from heat exhaustion. About 2,000 people were treated in first-aid tents over the weekend, and more than 40 were taken to hospital. However both the Vatican and the Italian authorities said that the whole festival had taken place without any major incident. The WYD was a strongly Catholic event, with little attention given to other Christian traditions, although members of the ecumenical Taize community and similar organizations took part. The WYD received substantial coverage in the Italian press. La Stampaof Turin described the festival as “a huge victory [for] Karol Wojtyla, the pope who has worked so hard, and charmed and won over so many; and also a victory for the church which has had its greatest success for the Jubilee Year with the youngest section of the population, the most difficult to reach, and the most important.”However il manifesto, a newspaper published in Rome, said the pope had given “the world an image of the Catholic Church which identifies it with the Supreme Pontiff. The price paid for this is the sacrifice of ecumenism and of dialogue between faiths.”La Repubblica, also published in Rome, commented that “Wojtyla didn’t give an inch to the church of lay people. He confirmed at every event the power of the Curia [the Vatican bureaucracy] and the absolute power of the pope over the bishops and even the Curia. But the young people at Tor Vergata who applauded him are representatives of the lay church, of the entire community.”The next WYD festival will be held in 2002 in Toronto, Canada. The Vatican’s official World Youth Day siteoffers transcripts of the pope’s many speeches, homilies, and greetings, as well as other World Youth Day information.
Read more about the event The New York Timescalled a giant “Love-In” from The New York Times,The Irish Times, The Boston Globe, BBC, CNN, and Associated Press.A biography of the popeis available at CNN.com.Learn more about Saint Catherine of Siena’s ideason the righteous “setting the world ablaze.”Previous Christianity Todayarticles about Roman Catholic millennium celebrations include:Many—But Not All—Churches Share in Opening of Jubilee Door in Rome| Historic ceremony’s link to Indulgences brings criticism from some Protestant churches. (Jan. 24, 2000) Poor Nations Get Debt Relief| After Congress passes Jubilee 2000 legislation, campaign rolls onward. (Jan. 4, 2000) Jerusalem’s Church Leaders Usher in Millennium Celebrations| Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox heads pray in Manger Square. (Dec. 8, 1999) Vatican amends Indulgences doctrine. (Nov. 28, 1999)
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