Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The weather was not cooperative. It had rained much of August 12, and the youngsters who had walked from one pre–World Youth Day event to another, and then out to the stadium, were tired, hungry, and frustrated. They began to feel a little bit better as they wedged themselves into their assigned seats and all sorts of stadium-like behavior began. Some were especially struck by the sight of several hundred American bishops, dressed in red-piped cassocks and skullcaps, doing “the wave” with the crowd. Spirits began to lift. The crowd sang the World Youth Day ’93 theme song, “We Are One Body,” over and over, led by the Irish pop singer Dana. The rain continued.

  As the papal helicopter approached the stadium in the twilight, those inside, including John Paul II, could see that Mile High was filled beyond its normal capacity. Ninety thousand youngsters, half-again as many as the skeptics had predicted for the entire four-day event, had somehow crowded into the seats and onto the stadium’s playing field for the opening ceremony. The rain stopped, as if on cue. But it was the noise that was beyond anyone’s imagining as the young people chanted time and again, “John Paul Two, we love you!” When the helicopter began its descent, the pilot, a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, had to fight to keep the chopper under control. The turbulence created by the youngsters’ cheers, the pilot later said, was buffeting the aircraft so strongly that it was causing instability. It was an eerie sensation. Here, against the magnificent backdrop of the Rockies and on a wholly different kind of mission, the atmospheric disturbance caused by the cheers for the Pope reminded him of what it had been like to be under fire during the war.

  An American television reporter told her cameraman that this was being stage-managed for maximum visual effect. All these kids were Vatican plants brought in to show support for the Pope. The cameraman just laughed: “Sure, a stadium full of plants.”

  Even before John Paul had arrived at World Youth Day’s first event, Denver had passed beyond the trap gate of cynicism. In a phrase that would become familiar to millions around the world, it had crossed the threshold of hope.1

  THE “BIG SURPRISE”

  When things finally settled down after the tumultuous welcome for the Pope, John Paul began a multilanguage roll call of the countries represented in Mile High Stadium, which set off another barrage of noise-storms. The roll call had become a World Youth Day [WYD] tradition, and it got the same enthusiastic response in Denver as it had in other venues. In his opening remarks, though, the Pope made sure that everyone knew that something was different this time. As in previous World Youth Days, he reminded the crowd, they had come together as pilgrims, not tourists, but this “stupendous setting in the heart of the United States of America” was not a traditional pilgrimage site. Rather, WYD ’93 had come on pilgrimage to the modern world, embodied in a self-consciously contemporary city surrounded by natural splendor. That meant, John Paul said, that he and his young friends were “searching for the reflection of God, not only in the beauty of nature but also in humanity’s achievements and in each individual person.”

  Secular modernity imagined that its heart was an empty shrine. Modern men and women thought they had outgrown the “need” for religious faith. But that could not be. For the modern world had been constructed by human beings whose lives were an open question. Humanity could not flourish in a world of empty shrines, which was an inhuman world. So World Youth Day had come to Denver, John Paul said, to make possible a “real encounter with Jesus Christ.” In that encounter, the world’s beauty was fully appreciated, solidarity was built on a secure foundation, and men and women were initiated into an “intimate communion with God himself, in a love that goes beyond all limits of time and space, to eternal, unassailable happiness.”

  It began to rain again during the Pope’s opening address, but the electric atmosphere wasn’t dampened as tens of thousands of youngsters huddled under colorful ponchos, umbrellas, and the giant signs—“Willkommen,” “Bienvenidos,” “Benvenuti,” “Welcome”—that had greeted John Paul. At one point, the Pope ad-libbed an apology for his “long, too long” speech—and got an earsplitting chorus of “No” in response. John Paul had also departed from his prepared text at the airport arrival ceremony earlier that day, and in a more pointed way. Replying to welcoming remarks by President Bill Clinton, the Pope noted that the United States had been founded on the assertion of certain self-evident moral truths about the human person, including every human being’s inalienable right to life. All the “great causes” led by the United States in the post–Cold War world, John Paul said, “will have meaning only to the extent that you guarantee the right to life and protect the human person.” Interrupted several times by the cheers of the few hundred youngsters who had been permitted to attend the airport ceremony, the Pope finally stopped reading his text, paused, and asked, “You are crying for what the Pope says, or against?” “For!” they shouted back.2

  The next night, Friday, August 13, Mile High Stadium became a great outdoor arena for reliving the experience of Christ’s passion and death during a floodlit celebration of the stations of the cross: fourteen commemorations of the events of Good Friday that begin with Jesus condemned to death by Pontius Pilate and end with his entombment. At the conclusion of the stations, the great pilgrim’s cross that had been given to the young people of Denver in Rome on Palm Sunday, 1992, and that had visited some forty American dioceses in the year and a half since, was solemnly raised by a dozen teenagers in polo shirts and jeans, behind the pitcher’s mound on a field normally occupied in August by Denver’s baseball team, the Colorado Rockies. John Paul then addressed the youngsters in a live message broadcast on the stadium’s enormous scoreboard.

  They had just participated, he said, in a biblically based reflection on the human capacity for injustice. Jesus, “accused before a judge who condemns more out of fear and cynicism than out of conviction,” became a “victim of human pride and corrupt justice.” In doing so, Christ had become “the image of what human beings are capable of doing to others when their hearts are hardened and the light of conscience is dimmed.” Love, however, had proven stronger than cynicism, fear, injustice, and even death itself. Christ had forgiven his torturers from the cross, and that forgiving love, John Paul said, “reaches out to everyone without exception,” filling the world with “life-giving grace.”

  To look into the face of the suffering Christ was also to meet and adore “the Lord raised up between earth and heaven.” Suffering became redemptive when united to the self-sacrificing suffering of Christ. Therefore, John Paul urged, “take courage in the face of life’s difficulties and injustices. Commit yourselves to the struggle for justice, solidarity, and peace in the world. Offer your youthful energies and your talents to building a civilization of Christian love.” That was what one learned from walking the way of the cross, “the mystery…at the center of the Church’s life.” 3

  The Pope had given himself a break for some hiking in the Rockies on Friday afternoon, before the stations of the cross. When he arrived at the St. Malo Retreat Center near Estes Park, Colorado, his host, Denver Archbishop J. Francis Stafford, expected that the seventy-three-year-old pontiff might take a nap of an hour or so. The archbishop certainly wanted one himself. Twenty minutes after the papal bedroom door had closed, John Paul was back in the main part of the house, calling out, “So where is the archbishop of Denver?” The two went off along the park’s hiking trails. Underneath his cassock, John Paul wore a pair of white sneakers with gold shoelaces, given him by some teenagers the day before.4

  As at previous World Youth Days, Denver’s closing Mass, in Cherry Creek State Park on Sunday morning, was preceded by an all-night prayer vigil. A quarter of a million youngsters, with sleeping bags, water bottles, and backpacks, hiked fifteen miles from downtown Denver to the park on Saturday afternoon, August 14. They made an impression as they walked en masse through the city. “I’m not a Catholic, and to a cynical old lawyer like me this is just wonderful,” said one man, Jerry Valentin
e, who gave water to the pilgrims as they walked past his home. The heat and the distance were too much for some, who took advantage of the aid stations scattered along the route. The Sudanese youngsters who carried the World Youth Day pilgrim cross on the last leg of the trek to the park said they felt fine; they walked at least this far lots of days.

  During the early evening, the pilgrims got settled in their assigned sections of the park, in territory usually inhabited by prairie dogs, coyotes, rabbits, deer, and owls. There was a bit of rain, but the meteorology contributed to the drama—John Paul arrived at the site just as a spectacular sunset broke through the cloud cover. The Pope spoke from a stage about the size of an American football field. Enormous TV screens scattered throughout the park brought him into closer contact with his young audience. The message did not lack edge.

  “In the modern metropolis,” John Paul said, “life…is often treated as just one more commodity to be organized, commercialized and manipulated according to convenience.” The drama of the moral crisis of modernity was that so many people refused to recognize the threat posed to life by reducing it to a commodity. Thus young people today had to make a special effort to keep open the dialogue with God and with moral truth that takes place in the conscience, “the most secret core and sanctuary of a person.” There, they would also encounter Jesus Christ, whose gift of divine life was “the only true and realistic hope” of a humanity on whom the shadows of a culture of death were lengthening. That was why he asked them to pray that night: “Maranatha! ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’”

  John Paul’s unstinting message changed what the press had begun to describe as a “Catholic Woodstock” into a night of serious reflection. The Pope, whose sense of audience remained acute, didn’t want to close on a note of unrelieved solemnity. Leaving the stage, he looked at his digital watch and said that he hoped to meet them the next day, “and for the moment he says to all of you, ‘Good night.’” Make it, he finished, “a night of singing, of joy, of sacred joy…. Adios! ”5

  The next morning, the Pope was helicoptered back to the park. Looking out the window, he saw the largest crowd in the history of Colorado, more than 500,000, with downtown Denver and the Rockies in the background. It was the solemnity of the Assumption of Mary, and John Paul greeted the great congregation accordingly: “In the name of Jesus Christ and his Blessed Mother, I say to you…good morning!” It was a blistering hot, dry day. Fourteen thousand people were treated for dehydration, and a fire truck provided by a courteous local government showered pilgrims on the edges of the venue during the Pope’s sermon.

  During it, John Paul continued to press the challenge of the previous night. The world, he suggested, could not wait for the young to become leaders in some ill-defined future. It needed their witness now. That meant entering the “never-ending battle being waged for our dignity and identity as free, spiritual beings,” and challenging the “culture of death” that tried to crush their desire to live life to the full. “Do not be afraid to go out on the streets and into public places,” he urged, “like the first apostles who preached Christ and the good news of salvation in the squares of cities, towns, and villages. This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel…. It is the time to preach it from the rooftops.”6

  After Mass, John Paul said good-bye in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Croatian, Arabic, Tagalog, Swahili, Korean, and Vietnamese before departing for Stapleton International Airport and his return flight to Rome. In response to Vice President Al Gore’s farewell remarks, John Paul said that he had come to Denver as “a pilgrim of hope” who believed that young people were capable of greatness. His hope was strengthened whenever he met the young because “the longing present in every heart for a full and free life that is worthy of the human person is particularly strong” in youth. Revisiting the history lesson he had proposed to President Clinton three days before, the Pope concluded with a prayer that “America will continue to believe in its noble ideals” and would thereby fulfill its destiny as “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.”7

  The Impact

  During the Cherry Creek State Park closing Mass, John Paul II had embraced Denver’s Archbishop Stafford and said quietly, “Thank you for making this historic event for the whole Church possible.” A year later, in September 1994, Archbishop Stafford brought the “John Paul II Choir” that had been formed for WYD ’93 to Assisi, Florence, and Rome. The Pope invited the group to an early morning Mass at Castel Gandolfo, where he told them that the event of the previous August “still lives on in my heart as one of the highlights of my pontificate.”8 “Historic event” and “highlight” were high praise from a man who had played such a large role in Church and world affairs for more than fifteen years. The long-term impact of the Denver World Youth Day can only be measured in the mid-twenty-first century, after succeeding decades have shown how John Paul’s challenge actually shaped a quarter-million young lives. But its immediate effect was substantial.

  Few, if any, Catholic initiatives since the Second Vatican Council have given so many Catholics a sense of themselves as members of the communio of a genuinely universal Church as John Paul II’s World Youth Days. That was certainly one impact of Denver, and particularly for the young American pilgrims. Young people by the thousands also experienced a deeper connection to the Church’s sacramental life. A standing joke during World Youth Day ’93 was that the lines outside the impromptu confessionals set up around the various venues looked like the lines at pizzerias or the other fast-food haunts of modern teenagers. It was a rough analogy, to be sure, but there is no doubt that many, many young people received the sacrament of penance for the first time in a long time during WYD ’93. One participant also sensed a “renewed interest, awareness, and awe for the Real Presence [of Christ] in the Eucharist.” Catechesis through a sacramental experience of “the mysteries,” a practice as ancient as first-century Christianity, was revived in Denver during World Youth Day.9

  Vocations to the priesthood and consecrated religious life were also clarified and reinforced. Two years passed before Dennis Garcia, a New Mexican teacher and participant in WYD ’93, finally made the decision to enter the seminary and study for the priesthood. But it was World Youth Day, he believed, that had planted the seed. Moreover, “the courage and vivacity of the youth, together with John Paul II, gave me the courage to finally say, ‘Yes.’”10 Garcia, it seems likely, was not alone.

  The city and county of Denver were also direct beneficiaries of World Youth Day—and not simply in terms of the multimillion-dollar economic benefit bruited by the local press. Something unmistakably calming took place in the Mile High City between August 11 and 15, 1993. The Denver metropolitan area had been experiencing a crime wave during the spring and early summer months leading up to WYD ’93. Yet during the five days of the event itself, the downtown and Capitol Hill neighborhoods, typically high crime areas, experienced a dramatic reduction in criminal behavior.11 For five days at least, a self-consciously secular city was caught up in and transformed by the power of youthful Christian witness. Many Denver citizens, skeptical at best about the Catholic Church and its purposes, were compelled to reconsider because of what they had seen on the streets of their own neighborhoods.

  The bishops of the United States were also changed by the Denver World Youth Day. Those who had thought the Pope’s moral challenge could not be heard in the American cultural context had to think again, as did those who felt that youth ministry was simply impossible. John Paul had demonstrated that young people could be reached through what Archbishop Stafford called a “language of presence.” The Pope had taught his American bishops that being young is a time designed by God for searching and that their job as bishops was to be present to that search.12

  The bishops also learned something about the vitality of Catholicism in America as a whole. The lack of interest in World Youth Day expected by some in the bishops’ conference staff was dramatically
falsified by the experience of tens of thousands of Catholic families across America who prepared their youngsters for the pilgrimage to Denver, helped pay their way, and, in short, made the entire event possible. Some things, evidently, were going right for the Church in the United States.13

  World Youth Day ’93 also caused some rethinking in the American press. The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, Jr., wrote shortly after the event that he had had “trouble recognizing the Church I’ve belonged to all my life in a lot of [the] coverage” of World Youth Day. The press’s obsession with debates over sexual morality left readers and viewers “clueless as to why so many people continue to belong to the Church.” Religious people, he concluded, “are owed a little more respect than that which is shown by the assumption that all they care about is sex and nothing but sex.”14 Peter Steinfels of the New York Times was another critic of his professional colleagues. The obsessive media focus on dissent and abortion, he wrote, “obscured” the Pope’s message. If his colleagues had paid closer attention to John Paul’s “underlying moral analysis” and his defense of “universally valid principles of morality,” Steinfels wrote, they would have discovered that the Pope had been speaking to a widespread American disquiet about the cheapening of life.15

  John Paul II came back from WYD ’93 with a more complex and hopeful view of the American situation than he had brought from Rome. He had been vindicated in his judgment that this celebration of a Gospel for the young could be taken into the very center of the secular “metropolis,” as he had called it. The Pope had also gotten a very different reading on American youth than he may have been receiving from the U.S. bishops. John Paul still had high hopes for a new evangelization and a new Catholic vitality coming ex oriente, from the Church east of the old Cold War divide. After the experience of WYD ’93, the Pope understood that there were also great possibilities ex occidente, out of the West.16