World Youth Day in Lisbon

 Although this Commonweal article by Austen Ivereign is behind a pay wall for those non-subscribers who have exhausted their monthly five article limit, it is worth the while to read it sometime. I will quote extensively from the sections that I think are most important.

A Church with Room for Everyone

Ivereign discusses the logistics of WYDs. 

"There were more than 600,000 registered pilgrims and 900,000 unregistered ones (plus 600 bishops, 50 cardinals, and 10,000 priests) flooding in for the Saturday night vigil and Sunday morning Mass at Tejo Park alongside the River Tagus." " a final crowd of 1.5 million—the biggest-ever gathering on Portuguese soil, a nation with a population of 10 million!

He reports it was the best organized ever.  I was unaware of the difficulties involved with unregistered pilgrims. Perhaps the fact it was the best organized allowed him to discuss what i would see as a huge problem. 

Then there was the huge ecological problem. Ivereign tells about all the efforts taken to alleviate this such as refillable water bottles. Again, good to see this problem is being addressed. You might detect that I have been skeptical about WYDs.

The role of bishops:

The 2018 synod on young people led to the creation of an advisory group of twenty young people at the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life. This group urged Fr. Chagas, the head of the dicastery, to introduce a new way of doing the catechesis that is the main activity of WYD pilgrims for three days. At previous WYDs, the young people were involved in creating music and prayers, but the catechesis itself was done in a traditional top-down way, with bishops speaking and young people listening. This year was different. At the so-called “Rise-Ups,” more than four hundred bishops from around the world heard from young people about the questions that arose from their pre-WYD dialogues on the topics of integral ecology, social friendship, and the mercy of God.

Again a much needed corrective.

Progress being made on a better approach to the virtual world:

At the opening Mass, the outgoing Patriarch of Lisbon, Cardinal Manuel Clemente,  contrasted the trustworthy reality of meeting in person with a virtual world of appearances. In a similar vein, Pope Francis, speaking at the Catholic University on August 3, warned against “replacing faces with screens, the real with the virtual

Yet in a sign that the Church increasingly sees the digital sphere as a place to evangelize, Lisbon’s WYD also hosted the first-ever world meeting of digital evangelizers and missionaries. The August 4 “Festival of Catholic Influencers” was organized by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications, which earlier this year issued a document calling for Catholics to bear witness to Christ through their digital presence, but to be wise as serpents in negotiating the traps and mechanisms linked to financial and political interests. 

The event ended with a lengthy blessing from the retired Honduran cardinal, Oscar Rodríguez de Maradiaga. Flanked by Paolo Ruffini, prefect of the communications dicastery, the cardinal blessed “these missionaries and evangelizers, so that, filled with the grace they received at baptism and being sent out by the Church, they might carry out with fidelity the mission of Christ’s Church, especially in the digital environment.”

Because the Church has not yet formally embraced the digital sphere as an apostolic mission this was not a Vatican-recognized formula, Msgr. Ruiz explained to me. But he said the blessing—Cardinal Rodríguez’s idea—was an important step in that direction.

I wonder what the Vatican would think of my efforts to bring the Liturgy of the Hours to the digital world. While Bishop Barron's organization wants to bring the Hours "Anytime. Anywhere with Anyone," they are still doing that by means of a monthly worship booklet (which of course makes money) as opposed to just putting it all on-line. 

A Church with room for everyone.  Francis made headlines with this. 

But it was mostly the pope himself who underlined the key theme of the synod as a Church without borders when he roused the sea of young people at the welcome ceremony with words that became the emblem of Lisbon that week: “In the Church, there is room for everyone. Everyone. In the Church, no one is left out or left over. There is room for everyone. Just the way we are. Everyone.”

However the most interesting report was from a side conference.

The most prophetic Franciscan element of WYD 2023 was the bid to create and defend a space where searchers and sinners and those who don’t feel they quite fit can encounter the mercy of Christ. For Francis creating that space is crucial to the Church’s capacity to negotiate this “change of era” in which structures built to resist modernity must be renewed and replaced by others that respond to the Galilee of our day. Hence his constant insistence that the Church is a place for all.

 I saw a powerful example of this missionary approach in the south of Portugal in the days before Lisbon, when I was invited by the Chemin Neuf movement to address young people at their pre-WYD gathering.

A French movement with around four hundred consecrated members and thousands of affiliates, Chemin Neuf is Ignatian and charismatic, with a particular vocation to Christian unity and to the young. Many of the four thousand young people present at the gathering in Portimão were not Catholics, and some of the Catholics would probably not describe themselves as such. Yet all were present for an intense program of piety and praise, with long periods of silent meditation in Adoration, as well as an opportunity for Reconciliation, either in the form of sacramental confession or a non-sacramental sharing with experienced couples. The gathering even had permission from the bishop of Algarve to offer eucharistic hospitality to all who came, an extension of the permission Chemin Neuf has in its home diocese of Lyons.

(Non sacramental) confession of sins to experienced couples and Eucharistic hospitality to all who come. Is that what "room for everyone. Just the way we are" is going to mean.  There is a history of "lay" confession and perfect acts of contrition, and there is baptism of desire, and ultimately individuals determine whether or not they are in a state of grace, so there is wiggle room on the question of Eucharistic hospitality.  Of course, an intense program of piety and praise is different from dropping into your local Catholic parish!