Making Noise in Rio

[Valin]

The Corner:

Kathryn Jean Lopez

July 29, 2013

 

When Pope Francis met with Argentinean youth in Rio Thursday, he announced some of his expectations for the World Youth Day events that would unfold in the subsequent hours and days:

 

I would like us to make noise, I would like those inside the dioceses to go out into the open; I want the Church to be in the streets; I want us to defend ourselves against all that is worldliness, comfort, being closed and turned within parishes, colleges, and institutions must get out otherwise they risk becoming NGOs, and the Church is not a non-governmental organization.

This NGO theme has been a recurring one since the start of his papacy. Depending on your role in or view of the Church, it may be an indictment, a wake-up call, a rallying cry, or a compelling reframing narrative that opens doors to those who have left the Church, considered it irrelevant, or never gave it a second thought.

 

On MSNBC and elsewhere, Pope Francis has been referred to in recent days as a rock star. Others have referred to him as the Tom Jones of the papacy, as people threw t-shirts at his open-air popemobile which I am pretty sure is a papal first. But to think that World Youth Day or the Catholic Church today is about the person of Pope Francis, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who just returned to the continent of his birth for the first time since leaving for the papal conclave after Pope Benedicts shocking resignation news just before Lent, is to misunderstand what we have witnessed and what is going on in Rio, Rome, and the universal Church. World Youth Day in Rio was a snapshot in countercultural renewal. Young people want something better than false freedom and something less than true love, as Pope Francis put it at various points during the weekend. The more than three million who gathered Sunday are rebels and theirs was quite a yell a Heavenly opus, binding the evil agenda of Hell.

 

(Snip)