WYD Madrid - a couple of visual snippits and a few thoughts

OK, so I haven't posted for two months, and yes, I do need a secretary so I can get around to posting more often! But in the meantime, here's a couple of amateur videos I took on the phone while in Madrid for WYD:

Pope Benedict arriving for the Vigil

What 2 million pilgrims look like

And here's this Sunday's homily (22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A). It's not much chop, but it does try to make a point about the reception of WYD and how we can learn from the pilgrims who have attended...

It was very hot in Madrid last week. It was also very crowded. And I didn’t get much sleep. But the beer was good and went down very well indeed. Oh, and there was also WYD going on. Madrid was my fifth WYD experience. So, you could say I’m rather experienced at it all. Some things are always the same – the crowds, the long, tiring days, the ‘joys’ of WYD meals, which are worse than airline meals from the old days.

Also the same is the immense spiritual blessings that somehow match and even overcome the physical exhaustion. These spiritual blessings are very much tied to the joy of travelling with the relatively small band of young pilgrims who end up under my care, watching them grow in faith and blossom as Christian disciples. There were 29 in our group, along with close to 4,000 Aussie pilgrims, and each of them has had that same WYD experience – they have come back to Australia quite different from when they left. The combination of renewed faith and joy brings with it great blessings and hope for the Church in OZ, and for our society in general.

This story will have been the same for the vast majority of people who went to Madrid for WYD, that is: the more than 500,000 young people who were there in the days leading up to the final Mass with Pope Benedict, and the nearly 2 million who were actually at that Mass. Exhaustion and faith; perseverance and hope; struggle and joy. This was no holiday; but it will remain in their memories for the rest of their lives, and it has changed their lives forever.

There is one thing about WYD, however, that these young pilgrims who have just returned home will not understand or appreciate. As far as the international media was concerned, including, I gather, the Australian media, about the only thing that happened in Madrid last week was a protest of a few thousand Spaniards at the presence of the Pope in their country, and a brief storm at which the pope’s hat was blown off. Two million young people who have made considerable personal sacrifice to come from the four corners of the world to celebrate their Catholic faith and to stand up as determined yet happy disciples of the Lord Jesus, verses a relatively small and ineffective protest march and a wet hat.

Being a Christian disciple in our world has become such an anomaly to those who influence our culture, that it finds it almost impossible to acknowledge it. In Madrid there were 2 million young people who, like the young Jeremiah of today’s first reading, have a fire burning in their hearts, yet this is no longer news worthy. We have just had an internationally massive event where hundreds of thousands of people have offered their exhausted bodies as a holy sacrifice pleasing to God, matching St Paul’s description of the saints of the Church from today’s second reading, yet the media cannot find a way of reporting it.

What the media finds unreportable, and our culture unbelievable, is for the nearly 4000 young Aussie pilgrims who have just returned home a sign of the cross of Jesus powerfully present for our world, a cross they have chosen to embrace and now carry willingly. So, how can we support our young Aussie pilgrims as they experience the rejection of their joy and hope by the culture surrounding them? Well, perhaps we need to learn to walk with them, so that we, too, can learn from them the true way of travelling the way of the cross.