The Recovering Choir Director

The Australian’s Christopher Pearson gives a very reasonable post-WYD report. Some excerpts:

Last week the Pope assured Sydney’s huge crowds that the church was not old and moribund but, like them, full of youth and vigour. To a wider audience, especially in Australia, this may well have seemed counter-intuitive. However, from a global perspective it’s demographically accurate in the light of the church’s burgeoning growth in the Third World. It also captures the pilgrims’ shared sense of participation in a supranational movement with plenty of life left in it, regardless of the bleaker picture painted by local church attendance statistics.

One astute observer of the local scene is Geoffrey Jarrett, the Catholic Bishop of Lismore in northern NSW. [Bishop Jarrett celebrated a Solemn Pontifical Mass for Juventutem in Sydney on July 16.] He has long been an advocate of regularly taking some of his flock abroad on pilgrimages. The obvious comparison is with the old Left’s strategy of building up a cadre. Whether in groups of 20 senior students or school principals, and to Rome, Jerusalem or the Marian shrines of Mexico, the idea has been to give people a taste of Catholic culture in a place where it is the defining culture of the country…

Australian Catholicism is deeply divided on any number of theological and ideological fault lines and teetering on the brink of institutional collapse in Queensland and Tasmania. Yet the Pope remains a powerful symbol of unity within the universal church and attracts far more loyalty and affection from young Australians than any local prelate or ecclesiastical faction. Can the bishops’ conference rise to the occasion and speak with one voice to the generation on whom its future largely depends? While there’s no accounting for providence, the odds are against it. What seems likelier is that the dioceses that are prepared to follow Benedict XVI’s lead, as witnessed in his preaching, teaching and liturgical example, will be able to provide the most convincing segues from the highlights of the past few weeks back to everyday life in the parishes. Elsewhere the mismatch will be a source of confusion and, for many, discouragement…

Another feature of WYD Sydney, especially in contrast to Toronto, was the marked improvement in the quality and performance of most of the music and the high church forms of the liturgy.

It was all of a piece with the greater use than hitherto of sacramental confession on the Saturday evening at Randwick and the reverent silences during Eucharistic adoration and benediction. Twelve years ago those practices were as unfamiliar to most WYD pilgrims as they still are to most behind-the-times Australian Catholics.

Letters to the editor by baby boomer grandparents notwithstanding, this generation is not put out by Mozart, Gregorian chant or Latin prayers. If, like many of their forebears, some of them smoked a bit of marijuana during the sleepover, like an earlier generation they seemed to enjoy a bit of incense and the Aboriginal smoking ceremonies, too. Judging by their respectful behaviour, solemn ritual is taken as a given and doesn’t offend them.

Individually, they may be by temperament a rather democratically minded lot, but they don’t seem in the least bit flummoxed by the primacy of the successor of Peter or the kind of sovereignty he exercises.