Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
October 4, 2000
A new generation of `flower children' is emerging
World Youth Day 2000, the largest pilgrimage in the history of Europe, provoked considerable press commentary. One striking analysis came from Eugenio Scalfari, an eminent Italian journalist of the secularist persuasion and former editor-in-chief of La Repubblica, one of Italy's major dailies.
In a front-page, signed column the day WYD-2000 concluded, Scalfari challenged the favorable press attention his Italian media colleagues had lavished on the young pilgrims. "Are a million and a half or even two million young people touring Rome in the Jubilee worth more than the two million who are flooding the Adriatic Riviera without crosses and litanies?" Scalfari asked. And what was the difference between World Youth Day's youngsters and the "flower children" of 30 years ago? Many of the latter "felt the same need" to "escape the solitary conditions to which modernity has condemned individuals" and "fulfilled it in their way, with their music, sexual liberty, jeans and miniskirts, feminism, pacifism."
Mr. Scalfari was also worried that the young pilgrims of August would become cannon fodder in the ecclesiastical wars, manipulated by Communion and Liberation, Opus Dei, and other renewal movements which, in the former editor's judgment, are only interested in the "power game." The participants in World Youth Day certainly didn't understand themselves that way, the Italian journalist conceded; but, according to Scalfari, they were, objectively, agents of "curial centralism" and the absolutist moral agenda promoted by their hero, Pope John Paul II.
Give Mr. Scalfari this: He had the courage to say what other critics of the pontificate were only thinking. But in the saying of it, he displayed a host of confusions and demonstrated, yet again, that many Italian intellectuals simply have not come to grips with the dramatic changes that John Paul II has made in "their" papacy.
Mr. Scalfari is certainly right that modern life can engender a lot of loneliness. But surely there is a dramatic difference between dealing with that loneliness by "turning-on and tuning-out," as the Woodstock generation proposed, and transcending it by a commitment to Christian community and the service of the world. The young pilgrims of WYD-2000 are not "worth more," in God's eyes, than their age peers on the beaches of the Adriatic. But they may have found a path to human fulfillment that is less strewn with broken glass and broken lives than the path of hedonism and "I did it my way." Isn't that a possibility worth exploring?
The world has not turned out the way Eugenio Scalfari and other secularists expected. The youth revolution of 1968 did not produce a more humane world order. It produced some good music, a lot of human suffering, and the poll-driven politics of Bill Clinton and Great Britain's Tony Blair. Worst of all, from the point of view of those who imagined that a secular utopia was at hand 30 years ago, the next generation has, in large numbers, found its way to God. Confusedly, perhaps; tentatively, maybe; but the opening to faith and to moral heroism is there. And that's the opening that John Paul II, who reads the signs of the times better than most newspaper editors, has seized.
The church has also not worked out the way Mr. Scalfari evidently expected. He is not, of course, alone in his frustrations. But isn't there something strange about the inability to take what is in front of you at face value? World Youth Day-2000 was, in its essence, a tremendous celebration of faith. Like anything else human it was multidimensional, and no doubt some of those involved had their ecclesiastical power agendas. But to mistake the revitalization of the church and the building of networks of Christian friendship that will shape the Catholic world for decades to come for another cynical gambit in the internal politics of Catholicism is, in a word, pathetic.
The new evangelization got an enormous boost from WYD-2000. And the new evangelization is not about the tattered old "who's in charge here" questions that continue to agitate those who cannot seem to understand that things have changed since 1968. The new evangelization is about proclaiming, celebrating, and serving Jesus Christ. That is who the pilgrims at World Youth Day-2000 met.
George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Contact Us
