LISBON After a complicated road-trip, four days before the World Youth Day proceedings officially begin, I find myself in Portugal’s capital to fulfil the Sunday obligation.
Lisbon’s sloping streets down to its riverbank are teeming with pilgrims, draped in matching t-shirts blazing the JMJ (“Jornada Mundial da Juventude”) official branding. Little bands of Catholics numbering as few as five to as many as twenty are a frequent sight. They are brandishing the flags of the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Belgium and Brazil. The internationality is undeniable; the festive spirit certainly lively.
We get to the Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Conceição Velha (Our Lady of the Old Conception) on the banks of the Tagus some 45 minutes early–– because Lisbon is unusually swamped at this time. Sure enough, it is standing room, with folk eagerly resting their knees on whichever unforgiving and hard patch of marble floor they could find.
This is the only diocesan Latin Mass venue for the entire country of Portugal. This in itself tells a story about the Portuguese Church. There are seven in London alone.
Our early arrival is vindicated. Some 400,000 have signed up for 2023’s global Catholic event here, but those who have made (and are yet to make) their way here number well over a million. If only 1 per cent of those had traditionalist sympathies, it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out the potential for oversubscription.
After Mass, I speak to some altar servers and young men wearing cassocks at a typical Lisbon cafe on the street behind the Church over a coffee while some others smoke. The skies are blue and the sun is hot, but the atmosphere is saved from stuffiness by the occasional breeze coming off the water and into the streets. All the same, everyone is glued to the shade.
Two of the cassocked men are from the FSSP (a priestly society under the patronage of St Peter dedicated to offering sacraments entirely in the old form and safeguarding Catholic orthodoxy) and are studying at its seminary in Wigratzbad. The other, a revert to the Faith, is a traditional architectural student. He explains his reversion to the Faith was a direct result of the conservative (and traditional-friendly) local cleric.
Reversions and conversions come for many reasons. Whilst in Vienna last year, my father and I spent the evening with a cheery-spirited German Catholic from Münster. He was now a father of two university-age children (also Latin Mass-friendly Catholics) who insisted the events which caused him to go deeper into his Faith were at World Youth Day in the early 2000s.
A Spanish woman I knew at university once told me the same story but for a much more recent WYD event. Let’s see how many more this will be the case for at Lisbon in 2023– but if the reader should be willing, I ask them to pray in their charity for a (presently) Anglo-Catholic and Flemish friend of mine named Jonas who travels beside me.
I speak also to a group of some five English pilgrims outside the Mass, most of whom have been homeschooled. There is a Canadian girl also, travelling solo most of the time. There are varied opinions on liturgical reform, the luminous mysteries of the rosary, the divine mercy chaplet, etc.
Nonetheless, undoubtedly there’s a unity. There is a sense even among those with whom we can only speak a broken form of the other’s language that we are here with real brethren. My fellow traveller and I first experienced this in a town called Evora– the capital of the Alantejo region– when a jovial party of Guatemalans came past cheering, singing and waving Catholic iconography. We got speaking to a few who were eager to share intimate details about their Faith with us, and left us with gifts and hugs. I am wearing a rather fine roped bracelet with a metal map of Guatemala attached on a ring to this day.
Even among five Jesuit seminarians who we bumped into on that same night– wearing no identifiable clericals – common fraternity and solidarity were found with ease. Traditionalists tend to have severe theological, liturgical and ecclesiological disagreements with contemporary Jesuits – but there is no trace of hostility here. There were big smiles and words of encouragement exchanged between ourselves and an Irish and three Polish seminarians.
The Catholic world is very divided, and those divisions require resolutions– some doctrinal, some canonical, some disciplinary. The JMJ is unlikely to do anything about these divisions.
But others merely require easing hostilities between various groups and a reminder to us, the faithful, that we are brothers and sisters in the mystical body, that we are not primarily citizens of the world, nor even our own nations, but of an ark. An ark which, if we abide in it, is headed for eternal life– where there will be “neither Jew nor Greek”.
The very nature of this ambitious initiative means it has already brought different people together in unity. As to whether it will be effective for evangelisation – especially when Bishop Américo Aguilar has stated, controversially: “We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that at all,” – well, let’s see.
I hope that by the end of the week stories of conversions like those so common at these events will be trickling in. I will be seeking them out and reporting on them for the Herald.
(Pilgrims gather to watch as the pilgrim image of Our Lady Fatima arrives by boat ahead of the World Youth Day (WYD), in Lisbon on July 31, 2023 | PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP via Getty Images)
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