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MESSAGE FROM FATHER LAURENCE, 13 AUGUST 2008
    WORLD YOUTH DAY - 2008

    Dearest Friends,
    No one, no even the British Crown, can put on a show like the Catholic Church. A papal funeral
    or election or the World Youth Day here in Sydney becomes a global liturgy.  Hostile press,
    complaining about costs and road closures, join the bandwagon and run headlines about the
    Pope working miracles with the weather and the euphoria of a city caught up in the youthful
    energy of God. The world stops and watches the ceremonies unfold (apparently) with religious
    perfection. More boats fill Sydney harbour for the pope than for the Australian centennial
    celebrations. The non-believer and cynics reluctantly feel moved by what they don’t believe in.
    Politicians declare that faith is real. It is a brave critic who voices dissent to such a populace.
    And there truly is grace at work in the numbers, hectic schedules and the over-stimulation of it
    all.

    It is the Church’s audaciousness that takes one’s breath away. As the pews of former
    Christendom continue to empty, the piazzas can still be filled with enthusiastic young people
    who are oblivious to the criticisms leveled against the institution they feel triumphantly they
    belong to. There is rich contradiction everywhere. A papacy that advocates restoration of the
    Tridentine rite shares limelight with rapping priests and rock concerts as well as Taize
    worship and Christian meditation.

    The church has always been composed of self-contradictions striving to achieve the state of
    paradox. That perhaps is the charism of Catholicism as it tirelessly tries to be truly catholic,
    inclusive rather than just another sect. Contradiction is irrational and leads to conflict and
    exclusion. Paradox is the portal of mystery and the life-blood of unity. And, however rarely and
    unpredictably realized it may be, one has to keep on trying for it or give up on the project of
    Church altogether. As the post-modern philosophers say there is always the possibility of the
    impossible and World Youth Day, true to its name, has become a kind of post-modern fiesta as
    well as an enriching global catechesis. The infinite connectivity of the internet, where
    everything can be linked to everything else, seems to have become flesh momentarily in the
    streaming video of the urban confluence of cultures and languages.

    Yet (an annoying little voice reminds us) the role of the crowd in the gospels is always to be
    wrong. The paradox glimpsed in these contradictions is deep and anarchic. As the pope was
    welcomed in Sydney Harbour some organisers of the WYD Christian Meditation Centre took
    the Day to a meditation group in a women’s prison a few miles away. Cardinal Pell had visited
    the prison some months ago and the genuine kindness of his presence with them was still
    lifting their oppressed spirits. Another ecclesiastical contradiction. Pilloried by the liberals, he
    is loved by the homeless men he visits regularly or the prisoners he does not forget.

    The women inmates, like monks, make much of small things, the issues and struggles of their
    enclosed cloister.  Like the Little Flower some of them have plunged deep. They understand
    when you say that, like Therese, they can find their vocation loving the world, hidden with
    Christ in God, at the heart of the Church. Cardinal Pell proclaimed at the opening mass that for
    these few days the centre of the Church was Sydney. True, one feels that. But it is no less
    centred in this small group of broken and excluded women who were so happy, so unenvious,
    to hear news of the euphoric events outside.
    I spoke about the prison to someone later. She said she had always had a terror of going
    inside a prison. I could only say for me it was a grace in paradox: flashes of divine goodness in
    places the world punitively labels bad and unforgiveable.

    Yes, God also manifests in the young and beautiful as well as the broken and unattractive. But
    faith always scratches below the surface of things. A group of young East Timorese came to
    meditate in the church and sang for us afterwards. I asked one pilgrim what he did back home
    and was pulled up by his saying ‘nothing’. He stayed at home with his family struggling to put
    food on the table. He had been forced to give up high school because there was no money for
    education. All day he was jostling and joking with young people from many countries, sharing a
    common faith but a very different and unequal lot in life. One church, one faith, one Lord but
    not yet one world.
    It is life’s contradictions that make judgment so difficult. ‘Do not judge,’ the Lord said. The
    same contradictions mean we can never fully believe our own rhetoric or trust our own
    successes without succumbing to the temptation to power. After all, ‘where two or three are
    gathered in my Name, I am with you,’ is really what justifies World Youth Day.

    Much love,


    Laurence