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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 21, 2011
Mass in Madrid
Let us take our eyes away from the news for a moment, in order to look at the news. That is to say, let us ignore for a moment how it is being reported, and look instead at what is happening.A very large public Mass is taking place, today, in Madrid, the capital of a once very great, and once very Catholic country. It is held outdoors, because there is no building in the world that can accommodate (way) more than a million people. This Mass is to be sung by a gentleman who is in his 85th year. There are few progressive intellectuals (including nominal Catholics) who will not assure us that he is totally out of touch with our times. According to official estimates, some 1,500,000 young persons - most, I should think, of the Roman persuasion - had checked into the Madrid area at the outset of "World Youth Day." If you have ever been to a hockey game in Ottawa, you may know what roughly 20,000 people looks like. Assuming, of course, a full house. Now multiply that by 75 to get some idea. Then add those who did not need to find a bed, in the Madrid area. I emphasize this number, even though every one of those persons is a unique human soul, who carries to Madrid, and carries away from Madrid, an unreproducible experience. Those who wish to generalize about them, may do so; as those who wish to generalize about, say, the young rioters in England. And generalizations are not without use: for I should think there is very little overlap between these two groups of young people. Still, notice in passing their relative numbers. (Hint: the cops in England have made about 3,000 arrests.) As of Thursday morning (when this column is filed), the number of protesters against World Youth Day could not be securely estimated. Enthusiastic sources mentioned "several thousand." They were creating unpleasantness around the periphery of the event, on the argument that it absorbs public funding that the Spanish state cannot afford. Paradoxically, or more precisely, hypocritically, these protesters were from agitprop groups previously protesting any attempt by that Spanish state to cut funding for anything. They finally found something they wanted cut. Their argument is a bold lie, incidentally. Such events are not organized like the Olympics. The expenses that (very) secular state is covering are incidental and derisory; it is meanwhile harvesting an extraordinary take in sales taxes alone. The costs are not small, but they are actually absorbed almost entirely by the pilgrims, and by the sponsoring ecclesiastical institutions. And what these people spend, while they are visiting Madrid, is "good for the economy." Of course, they did not come to benefit the local economy, but to hear their Pope; to audit other sources of Catholic teaching and inspiration; and to participate in that vast Mass. I would be happy to wax on about such topics, but readers genuinely curious do not need my play-by-play. They cannot do better than to read, directly, the relevant documents. Read, I would suggest, what the Pope says; and not what some journalist whose tone betrays contempt, and who is not even slightly interested in the context and religious background, says he says. Though you might then want to read the news reports, to appreciate the contrast. Let me now praise one of my leftish colleagues, Andrew Brown: columnist, blogger, and editor of the "Belief" department at The Guardian, which is the Vatican of British progressive thought. He is to my belief an honest man, however; flattery I do not distribute lightly. In a piece widely disseminated through the Internet, this last week, he tried to explain why the media would focus on this ragbag of leftist protesters, and the supposed "funding controversy" behind their protests, when the story was so obviously the 1,500,000 souls. ("Pope in Madrid amid controversy" was the BBC website headline at the time.) Brown conservatively estimated the number who were in Madrid to hear the Pope at 300 times the number from "secularist, feminist, gay and lesbian, alternative Christian and leftist groups." (That was the description of Deutsche Welle, the German equivalent to the BBC.) Brown's conclusion was intelligent and pointed. Journalists, for the most part, do not identify with those "papal youth." (I provide at least one exception.) They identify more with the protest groups. In fact, they look upon those assembled hordes of clean-cut, polite, conscientious, God-loving and God-fearing youth as "quintessentially unfashionable." Or if you prefer, terminally uncool. While Brown was also trying to extenuate progressive journalists, from such charges as anti-Catholic bias, or theological animus (oh please!), his analysis nevertheless moves the dial in the right direction. These are mostly European "kids" - from the "lost continent" of Christian faith. Not all lily-white however. According to one of my informants, a visible minority are of Turkish, Persian, and North African ancestry. This was one of many newsworthy angles I thought some journalist might want to pursue, when he was finished exhaustively covering what we know already: that there are lots of people who don't like the Pope. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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