Young Catholics Come Together, if Not Their Views
The group of teenage pilgrims traipsing through Lisbon during this week’s big meeting of Catholic youth from all over the world seemed to have taken to heart Pope Francis’ call for them to shake things up.
It would be better, one girl said, if the church were “more inclusive of all relationships, gay rights and all that.” A boy holding a portable speaker playing pop hits added he would be all for “girls being priests.” Another girl, with an Irish flag draped from her shoulders, said that she would like to hear “women say Mass.” “More people would then practice the Catholic faith,” said Alexandra Beattie, 17, who, like the others, was a student at St.
Ciaran’s College, in Ballygawley, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. “Yeah,” said Niamh Quinn, also 17, “people would come in and it would only produce good things because the message is good — love one another.” Francis, 86, has sought to breathe fresh air into the church during his decade as pontiff, and at the World Youth Day celebrations this week in Portugal he has stressed that “the church has room for everyone.” “Todos, todos, todos,” he said, using the Spanish and Portuguese word for everyone, and then urged a boisterous crowd of 500,000 people on Thursday evening to say those words together in their own languages.
But at such a vast gathering, the ideological translation of “everyone” shifted markedly depending on who uttered it. For all the pope’s calls for unity and fraternity, World Youth Day emerged as yet another picture of a fragmented global institution with often contradictory interests pulling at its future.
