World Youth Day was an astonishing and wonderful event. It gathered something like 1.5 million young Catholics together in Lisbon. If the world’s media failed to respond with the interest and astonishment that it deserved then Catholics have celebrated it with respect and appreciation, both to those who came and for those who organized it.
Only the Catholic Church could draw the young in such numbers and offer such inspiration. The success of the venture should indeed be the cause of encouragement and celebration, and the internet is brimming over with gratitude and enthusiasm from many of the participants, especially as they responded to Pope Francis’s message to “be courageous”.
But at the same time the Church that has committed itself to “listening” and “accompanying” has received some other responses. While the opening mass has been praised for its power and beauty, other aspects of the event have caused concern and distress. Many of the young people questioned the “festival culture” reflected in immodest liturgical dancing around the altar, the widespread use of techno music, and in particular the closing mass.
The pre-consecrated hosts for the mass were stored unceremoniously the night before in large grey utilitarian plastic containers and housed on tables in small tents with the minimum of dignity, decorum or reverence. When some participants came across them as they made their way to bed that evening they were shocked and had to ask if these hosts had indeed been consecrated. They found they had.
Their response to what seemed to them to constitute serious Eucharistic disrespect was one of great distress, which quickly came to be described as “the Tuppernacle debacle”. Many of the young people took to social media to call for some form of proper response, in particular reparation. Groups of participants swiftly formed rotas to take turns in kneeling through the night to offer adoration as some form of compensation for the disrespect.
One poignant photo in particular was put up on social media, with the caption: “The three people kneeling and praying are myself and my friends. We were almost brought to tears when we saw that Jesus was in a literal Tupperware, so we knelt and said a rosary for offences against his Sacred Heart.”
Whilst many were anonymous, these words came from a 22-year-old American called Savannah. She had been inundated by other people there, equally distressed and not knowing what they could do, or what they should do. Vigil through the night was one response. But another is the invitation to ask the Church to re-think how it balances the sacred and the secular, and the relevance of this goes far beyond World Youth Day.
Pew Research has recently documented that only one third of Catholics in the USA believe that anything actually happens in the Mass. The rest have adopted a secular mindset that does not believe in transubstantiation, one that has found itself incapable of managing mystery and miracle. It repudiates the Mass as nothing more than a piece of liturgical symbolism.
Whatever lies behind this incapacity to believe, the way in which the Church goes about presenting its eucharistic practices plays some part. Steve Skojec, a conservative Catholic blogger, recently expressed some of the frustration of faithful Catholics in what he recognised as a Twitter rant to a progressive colleague about the sterile pursuit of relevance:
“I was born in ’77, and I’ve never in my life seen anything but felt banners and ‘Lord of the Dance’ and glad tambourines and communion in the hand and polyester-albed EMHCs (when they’re not women in skintight pants) and homilies that are straight out of Chicken Soup for the Low-IQ and all the not-very-ambiguously-gay pastors and the pastors who reprimand people for wanting to genuflect or receive communion kneeling or kneel during the consecration … I’m sick of “presiders” not “priests”, of ad-libbed liturgies, of questionable absolutions in the confessional (when you’re not being told that your sins aren’t sins), of dramatic preachers who have to run out into the congregation to give their lame homilies that are theologically heterodox but can scarcely elevate the host at the consecration for half a second.”
If the climax of his frustration here was the Eucharistic disrespect, it speaks also to the alarm and distress experienced by Savannah and so many of her contemporaries in Lisbon. There can be little doubt that institutional Eucharistic disrespect has had a role in fostering a climate of disbelief amongst Catholics of their parents’ generation.
Bishop Robert Barron, in an interview in Lisbon with Colm Flynn, also reflected on this by lamenting “dumbed-down Catholicism”. He insisted that “Everyone is hungry for God, whether they know it or not.” For Bishop Barron part of the richness of World Youth Day had been the presence of non-Western Catholics who were free of the myopia of secularism.
“When there is an opportunity to come together to seek God and praise God, young people respond. They don’t want an uncertain trumpet or a vacillating message; they want something clear, and when they to get it they respond it to. We dumbed down the faith for far too long. My generation got a dumbed-down Catholicism and it has been a pastoral disaster… We dumbed down the faith in an attempt to make it relevant and we undermined ourselves.”
Skojec ended his Twitter rant by excoriating the pursuit of “relevance”. “Historic Catholicism produced martyrs,” he said. “Modern Catholicism produces lapsed Catholics and atheists.”
The lure of relevance appears to be what Bishop Baron insists is not so much relevance as “dumbing down”. It is no accident that one of the discoveries that has contributed to waves of converts from Protestantism in the recent decades has been the phenomena of Eucharistic miracles presented for validation to scientific laboratories.
As bleeding hosts have been subjected to laboratory tests that have consistently demonstrated the presence of white blood cells from living cardiac tissue in an outcome that has been completely beyond the capacity of either science or rationalistic explanation, the claims of the Catholic Church to be the agency of daily miracle have been vindicated. Relevance loses any traction if might be thought to have in contrast to transcendence and the miraculous.
For many Protestants, the simplicity of a wooden or clay chalice in unprepossessing circumstances reflected the humility of the Incarnation. But the miracle of the Mass, reflected in centuries of miraculous phenomena down the ages, and now ratified by scientific analysis, led to a different emphasis and a different response – that of adoration of Jesus in the Eucharist, and the response of love to this miracle that only the best would do.
The grey Tupperware tabernacles dumped in tents in Lisbon on the eve of the WYD closing mass provoked crowds of Catholic youth to come that night with candles and flowers and to kneel, adore and keep vigil through the hours in reparation for this disrespect. They sent a signal to the rest of the Church that the future of the faith lies not with dumbing down but with an apprehension of the wonder of the miracle of the Mass, and the love and adoration that flows from it.
The question for those who organised the closing mass of World Youth Day, is can they listen to what the youth have told them, and accompany them accordingly?
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