However the piece really hits on the Liturgy and what Benedict is trying to do. It is a very good read for a Secular paper.
Here it is it my comments in red:
For some of the pilgrims to World Youth Day, the new friendships they strike up will be the highlights of the event. For others, it will be the travel or events on the program such as the choral workshops or more inspiring preaching than they're used to at home.
But for most, the presence of the Pope is the main attraction.
Three years ago it would have been hard to credit. At that time Benedict XVI was generally regarded as a reserved, rather formal figure; a scholar rather than a pastor. However, even his fiercer critics now concede he has grown in the office and that the Panzer ardinal formerly charged with enforcing theological orthodoxy has come to project great personal warmth.
(It would be nice if the media would admit that their bad reporting of Vatican and Catholic news over the years contributed to this misconception).
It was thought that he could never compete with the theatrical panache and crowd-pulling capacity of John Paul II. It turns out that Benedict is a mesmerising speaker who takes the trouble to convey complex ideas using simple language. His weekly Wednesday audiences regularly draw even larger numbers than those of his predecessor.
(I think the fact that the Pope is the ultimate Prof one would like to have in college is part of it. Making the difficult and hard to understand or to accept well intelligible to the ordinary person. However perhaps there is a true Spiritual quality that binds the Successor of St Peter to his flock).
He has other attributes that particularly attract young people, irrespective of whether they're Catholics. Like the Dalai Lama, his presence is such that the courtesy title "His Holiness" doesn't generally strike them as misplaced. He's also grandfatherly without being in the least condescending, interested in them and constantly assuring them that they're capable of great things.
The Pope understands the constants in human nature. He knows that each rising generation - however defensive about admitting the fact - has a kind of spiritual hunger, the need for a sense of the numinous. It is widely regarded by neuro-scientists as hardwired in the brain, though most of them deplore the fact. In part, it's wanting a sturdy worldview to underpin the intimations of order and beauty in nature. In part, it's craving reassurance that suffering and death are not what they seem.
Religious hope springs eternal. In Australia, for example, the current crop is without doubt the most inadequately catechised in seven generations, but they'll turn up in droves to see and hear him. Bizarre new age cults may have become so popular that some sections of Australian Catholicism are reinventing themselves along pagan lines and junking core beliefs and traditions in the quest for relevance. Yet CDs of monks singing Gregorian plainchant turn up regularly at the top of the charts, because the music reaches the hearts of thousands who've scarcely darkened a church door.
The Pope recognises that most young people still aspire to lead a moral life, to be faithful spouses, loving parents, to enjoy the trust and affection of their friends and workmates. He sees them as more often capable than their elders of rising above the snares of consumerism. They're apt to pay closer attention to his warnings about selfishness and his encouragement of high ideals.
Another thing the Pope instinctively grasps is that man is a ritual animal. Unlike many modern clerics, he sees that rituals that are supposed to enact supernatural truths have a radically different character from the rites of ordinary sociability.
(EXACTLY)
A fortnight ago (it is nice to see this term used in English Journalism :) ), in a live-streamed sermon to the Eucharistic Congress in Canada, he startled many of the clergy present by flatly contradicting what they'd been teaching since the late 1960s. He said: "The mass is not a meal among friends. It is a mystery of the covenant." The fundamental problem in Catholicism's 40 years in the wilderness has been the erosion of a sense of the sacred. As the church itself began to lose confidence in the real presence of Christ in the eucharist, it began to look for less demanding and more contemporary ways of construing the mass. Belief in a bloodless but nonetheless material re-presentation of the sacrifice of Calvary and the mysterious transubstantiation of the bread and wine were thought too much to expect of baby boomers and in any case an alarmingly large percentage of clergy had come, more or less openly, to doubt it all.
(Honesty!!!)
A community meal, a function where the congregation's presence is seen as in itself incarnating the body of Christ, seemed so much more modern and plausible, planing down the supernatural to mere metaphor. The Pope calls these self-preoccupied celebrations, devoid of their proper focus, "parish tea-party liturgies".
American commentator Amy Welborn, has referred to them in comparably scathing terms as manifestations of "The Church of Aren't We Fabulous!".
The Pope has no objection to tea parties, of course, but in their proper place, rather than around a high altar. His principal reforms in the past three years have been concentrated on the liturgy and church music. Many of the World Youth Day pilgrims will be young or youngish people who've grown up in bleak, modern churches devoid of careful ritual or the canon of sacred music.
They know from the Catholic blogosphere (The Power the Net!!!!) that he's trying to recover the sacramental theology, along with the beauty and inspiration, that traditionally characterised worship and it's a project a lot of them consciously support.
Before turning to some of the recent reforms, there are a few points to be made about the overall project. To liberal-minded clerics, the prospect of young Catholics who are keen as mustard about the classic Latin rite or the "reform of the reform" push, who want the newer rite celebrated with greater solemnity and traditional music, can seem very threatening.
The fact that many of that generation find this frightening is true and a incredible irony sincemany have been extolling how the Church was clamping down on the lay voice.
They're inclined to assume that the kids have signed on to a package deal involving a wholesale rejection of the Second Vatican Council, doubts about the legitimacy of any pope since Pius XII, a return to the aridity of 1910-style Thomism, political ultra-conservatism and much else besides.
OF course most of these kids are very much aware that Pope Benedict himself is a product of the Council.
In fact, one of the noteworthy things about the youthful devotees of the old rite - who in Australia border on being the majority of its adherents - is that they mostly come without the cultural and ideological baggage associated with older die-hard traditionalists.Many say they come for the sake of a more reverent atmosphere, or for the ritual silences that aid concentration or just for a mass done strictly by the book, with no novelties or abuses. That is to say, they take the liturgy itself as a given but that's all. A higher percentage were home-schooled but very few of them, for example, are likely conscripts to the right wing of the NSW Liberal Party, let alone neo-Hansonites in the making.
I am no expert on the Political thinking of "older die hard traditionalists" whatever that means. But I thought the political box that many were trying to put them in was too limited. It is true they were not out their screaming "Keep your Rosaries off my Ovaries" in the street but their politics seemed to range from mainstream Conservatism, to Pat Buchanan Populism and Paleo Conservatism to Chesterton distributionist , and various other points on the political spectrum.
Gradually the Pope has been restoring Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony to pride of place in papal liturgies in Rome, despite the unco-operative attitude of the Sistine Chapel Choir. Distinguished composers of the recent past, such as Bruckner and Messiaen, are also restored to favour. It would be nice to be able to announce that the era of soft Italian pop and 1960s kitsch is almost over. Alas it's not true, because the leading exponents are well entrenched. However, the Pope's own standards, especially those that can be observed on television broadcasts, set the overall tone for the rest of the church.
WYD tends to bring out the very worst in baby boomer musicians and liturgists hell-bent on designing celebrations according to their own preferences and, in a sense, in their own image. (Well Said) A great many lapses of taste and judgment are par for the course, usually justified on the grounds that "it's what young people want". (Sigh)
Whatever the compromises in store at Randwick racecourse, there is one recent reform in papal liturgies that will provide an edifying example next Sunday. The Pope has long argued that, for the laity, receiving communion kneeling rather than standing and on the tongue rather than in the hand is more fitting and conducive to devotion.
It will come as news to most Australian Catholics but the older practice is still normative. On the feast of Corpus Christi, some weeks back, his new master of ceremonies announced that it would once more be the normal mode in which the Pope would personally administer the sacrament.
At Randwick, we can expect to see a kneeler for Benedict's communicants and a precedent set for the millions who will be watching the broadcast.
That will hopefully be significant and I suspect will be noted for the first time on a much larger scale.
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