::Popestock::
To the ongoing confusion of secular hipsters and aging sixties (yes, it was last century!) liberals John Paul the Great pulled bigger than anyone else on earth, 5-7 million young people in the Philippines alone on one . Literally millions and millions of youths have attended World Youth Day meetings in various places since 1987.
John Lennon once boasted that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. The late Holy Father, even stricken with Parkinsons and barely able to move, proved just how wrong that claim was. When given the opportunity to visit with Jesus on the altar, to speak with Him in the Gospels and to pray with Him alongside His Pope, the young came in droves.
They still come, they pack St Peter's square and mourn the man who reached out to them, at the :
Vox Christi
"I have looked for you. Now you have come to me. And I thank you.::Why Do We Love Him?::"
Why did such a man capture our hearts? Why did he energise young people in such a profound manner?
Put simply, John Paul the Great was massively popular because he preached Christ crucified and nothing less, eschewing Catholic lite and the easy mythologies of secular liberalism in favour of the authentic truths of Christianity. To a generation brought up by jaded baby-boomers with their lazy liturgies, overly pessimistic attitude towards hierarchy and authority and perhaps most boringly, their self-serving ethics, based on bankrupt moral relativism, the firm honest Polish pontiff came as a welcome relief. Here at last was a man with guts and vigour, who spoke the truth even when it was unpopular.
Here at last was a real man to counter the limp-wristed oppression of the guitar-hymners.
John Paul the Great knew that young people are not enchanted by women priests and talk of aborting the weak and the young, rather we are slaves to meaning. Young people cry out with optimism about the future and seek honesty, justice and a sense of personal holiness.
John Paul the Great gave us all those things and more.
::Our Friend::
In countless gestures, the Pope let us know he was one of us. He could either wink, or smile or even twirl his cane while doing both and he instantly became the kind of figure that Japanese schoolgirls would put on their stationary, the Pope was appealing and avuncular.
Our Pope, Our Friend
And he didn't patronise us. Even while to young people in America, the centre of popular culture, hip-hop and MTV, he didn't dumb it down:
""You know very well ..and he didn't bullshit:. that satisfactions afforded by a superficial hedonism are ephemeral" and that it is a mistake to "enclose ourselves in the shell of our own egoism," he said. The pope said that young people have the responsibility and the promise to build a "civilization of love" by giving "absolute priority to the value of the spirit" and by overcoming divisions and the various forms of materialism.
"
""Freedom is not the ability to do anything we want," the...Not the kind of thing you hear everyday!holy father told 20,000 teenagers in an appearance in St. Louis in 1999. "Freedom is the ability to live responsibly the truth of our relationship with God and with one another.
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::The Hard Truth Sells::
Contrast this with the overriding mentality of our parents' generation, those hypocrites who drugged themselves to get through their adolescence before fucking anyone and everyone they could get their sad hands on. We learned to spurn men* because they just cannot defeat the 'fat, relentless ego'.
We saw the fruits of such actions, the meaninglessness of art, music and indeed politics influenced by drugs, the vapidity of a people who love for an hour or a week and then cast off their lovers, content to kill the children that result.
World Youth Day Rome, 2000
In the midst of such an ugly quagmire, the Holy Father's voice out:
"You are children of the light (cf. Jn 12:36)!You belong to Christ, and he has called you by name."
"Do not listen to those who encourage you to lie, to shirk responsibility, to put yourselves first.
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