World Youth Day is something I witnessed only once, when it was happening around me in Toronto, six years ago. It is very much a legacy of the last Pope, and almost an imposition on the present one, Benedict XVI—titular leader of more than half the world’s Christians, and unofficial spokesman for many of the rest. He sings today the vast Papal Mass at Sydney, Australia, in the city’s Randwick Racecourse.
My more attentive readers will recall I became a Catholic, five years ago, thinking it at first an escape from collapsing Anglicanism, but soon instead an entry into the one true Church. Like probably every “youff” pulled to Sydney for the Mass and associated events, it marked me definitively as one of the kids who is consciously uncool.
Pope Benedict finds himself the spokesman for all the motherhood and apple pie that has been rejected by postmodern man. He says some things that we hear in passing; for instance, “scars which mark the surface of our earth—erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption.”
And other things we only think we hear: “Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises.”
To which I would add, the pain of false apologies, specifically all those made on behalf of people who lived in previous ages. It is, to my ears, a false note sounded in sermons that otherwise directly challenge us—the living—to wrestle with the real issues in this world, and move beyond convenient illusions.
The connexion between the scars of our earth, and insatiable consumption, is the true one. The cure cannot be so glib as passing some law, some Kyoto, some infinitely comprehensive green shaft legislation, to tie the planet up in red tape as well.
Extravagant products and the technologies to make them are here to stay, for the foreseeable future. The cure can only be to win the hearts and minds of the people themselves: to persuade them somehow not to want the garbage for which they lust, and instead to desire things that are not garbage.
But this must be voluntary, in the main. For the Christian message is of freedom—a radical freedom, reflecting Scripture and Tradition received as divinely inspired. God, in the Christian account of things, has left man very free to choose his destiny—left the individual, as it were, to choose his poisons. Law requires that we punish exceptionally evil behaviour, for the sake of defending our own autonomy, but when law is used to “compel the good,” there can be no freedom.
This is at the heart of the “Judaeo-Christian heritage,” upon which our Western civilization was raised; which incidentally made it more successful than any other civilization the world has seen; and still inspires a future that is inconceivable on any other theological or doctrinal basis. “That you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
There are parallels: I find them especially in Buddhism, but also within each of the other great world religions. If I did not think the organizing Christian vision was the most complete, of course, I would not be a Christian.
We have the freedom to go wrong, but as a consequence of that, also the freedom to go right. And just as we are under no immediate compulsion to behave in perfect obedience to divine command, we are likewise under no immediate compulsion to live ignobly, as mere generators and consumers of excess wealth.
Each man and woman is, moreover—according to this fine religious tradition, that remains our embodiment of the “philosophia perennis”—called in his or her own name. As Plato said, all philosophy is personal. The Buddha said as much; and the saints and thinkers of the West have reiterated, that it all comes down to the human being. He must choose his path through temptations and opportunities. He must choose his guides. He owes a death, and in the last analysis he must walk towards it alone with the Maker he has either accepted or rejected.
Or to use the old-fashioned language, desperately awaiting revival, there is a way to redemption, and a way to perdition. We may tyrannize our fellow man, with directories of petty regulations, imposed without his reasonable consent. But no earthly government, no matter how powerful or intrusive, has the ability to send a single soul to heaven or hell.
In the divine is thus the very possibility of our freedom: in a power that lies above that of every earthly power—including even the Pope’s, as Catholic doctrine makes clear.
The Pope has anyway only the power to be heard, and the responsibility to repeat, what every genuine sage has told us since the world began: that if we lead worthy lives, we needn’t worry about matters far beyond our control. This is the truth, and it begins at home.
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