youth day

I've just returned from leading a 7 day trip to World Youth Day in Sydney. While it was a really fruitful time, it's been a relief to get home and, amongst other things, get some space to reflect on the experience.

In the midst of the madness, it was fascinating to witness the complicated relationship between something as entrenched as the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church with the fluid and kaleidoscopic 150,000+ young people gathered in Australia.

While the rallies, restaurants, seminars and shops provided a forum for positive cross-pollination, it was the large-scale liturgies where tensions in the relationship became apparent.

The clear evidence of communication meltdown was nowhere more obvious than in the misguided choice to saturate every gathering with lashings of Latin - pleasing the neo-conservatives, but leaving the remaining 99% voiceless and disconnected from the sanctuary of celebration.

Whilst the scriptural texts and prayers were appropriately read by a wide variety of linguistic groups, almost every other responsorial part of the living liturgy was in a dead language. From Senegal to Sweden, Nova Scotia to Northern Ireland, the young Catholics of the world were united in dumbfounded confusion.

Latin was arguably the main language of international relations during the first 15 centuries of the Christian Era. Now, for late modern young people it is used to describe rare illnesses and plant varieties. We don't even have a common memory of Latin. It has no place in liturgy because it no longer performs the task it once aimed to fulfil (and even then, only for an educated minority). If St Augustine were writing today, he would be a master of English - the language of business, MTV and the worldwide web.

The decision to give preference to ancient sentamentality over relevant and effective immediacy may not be suprising, but it does offer an intriguing glimpse into the stuttering relationship between the Church's young people and hierarchy. Although the air was sonorous with chants of 'Benedetto' and hearty renditions of the pop-idol theme song, I wonder if those on the podiums noticed the frustrated, impotent silence that descended at the truly important moments of intimacy with God and one another found in the summit points of the liturgy. Or maybe they simply mistook it for stunned awe.