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I suspect that if St. Peter himself were to be standing exactly where I am standing today and said, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation!”, many of us—assuming, of course, we didn’t first tune St. Peter out—would be offended, if not outraged. While we may be willing to admit our generation is “corrupt,” none of us wants to think about ourselves and as being “corrupt.” No, just like those listening to St. Peter as he preached, I suspect we’d rather think of ourselves and our generation as “much better than” or at least “a great improvement upon” previous generations. “How dare St. Peter call us corrupt?” many of us might react. And then, reflecting a little more about it, how many of us might become, if not indignant, outraged? Truthfully, I believe the answer to those questions is “most of us.” “Sure,” we may be thinking, “those were pretty corrupt generations. But, certainly not I!” But, listen carefully. Did you notice? That’s nothing but a variation on what Judas said to Jesus at the Last Supper, “Certainly it is not I, Lord?” I remember having lunch one day back in the early 1994 with Fr. John Lipp. It’s quite likely the case that none of you know who Fr. Lipp is or all of the good he’s accomplished during his decades of priesthood. But, for me, Fr. Lipp is one of those rare gems—the genuine article—the type you come across only a very few times in life. At times, Fr. Lipp can be a pain at because he “calls it as he sees it.” As you may have already guessed, this characteristic trait—being frank—has caused some—especially his superiors over the decades—to hold Fr. Lipp in somewhat less-than-high regard. At any rate, the topic at lunch that day was Pope John Paul II and the “World Youth Day” that was held in Denver in 1993. One of the brethren seated at the table, Fr. Ralph Schuler, asked, “John, why is the Holy Father spending so much time on young people? They’re not interested in religion.” Without batting an eye, Fr. Lipp responded with a chuckle in his voice, saying, “For God’s sakes, Ralph! It’s obvious. The Holy Father has given up on adults.” Before taking Fr. Lipp out to the woodshed for a whooping, perhaps it might be the case that Fr. Lipp was more accurate in his assessment of adults than many of us would prefer. If we survey the moral terrain confronting the Holy Father in the 1980s and 1990s, it wasn’t young people who had sold their souls to the false promises of secularism, materialism, and consumerism. Young people weren’t neglecting prayer, reading scripture, or practicing the sacraments. Young people weren’t excluding God from the workplace and a personal vocation from one’s occupation. Young people weren’t telling their children “Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce.” No, it was this generation of adults—that’s you and me—who had sowed the seeds of corruption and were enjoying its fruits, all the while convincing ourselves that the Church, its moral teachings, and its sacraments were “out of date,” “arcane,” “meaningless,” and “irrelevant” to the realities of our daily lives. Here’s a simple test to find out whether you belong to this “corrupt generation.” Do you recognize this April 8, 1966 cover of Time magazine?
If you do, then you belong! Confronting this moral wasteland, Pope John Paul II decided to speak directly to young people, to inspire the idealism present in their hearts, and to spend his efforts getting young people to hear and to accept—in St. Peter’s words, “…the promise made to you and to your children and to all those far off, whomever the Lord our God will call”—so that young people would save themselves from this—our—“corrupt generation.” So it was that Pope John Paul II invited young people throughout the world at World Youth Days to explore the personal and vocational dynamics of adolescence and young adulthood by experiencing Jesus who, in today’s gospel, identified himself as “the gate.” Jesus said: “Whoever enters through me will be saved….so that [you] might have live and have it more abundantly.” Or, as Fr. Lipp observed, Pope John Paul II gave up on this generation of adults, deciding to let them justify themselves before God and, instead, to provide young people throughout the world the model of faith their parents had failed to provide their children. A harsh, cold, cruel, judgment? Perhaps so. But, that doesn’t mean the analysis was incorrect. After all, do you recall theologians in Central and South America jeering at Pope John Paul II in the early 1980s when the Pope reprimanded them for relying upon Karl Marx rather than Jesus Christ for their blueprint of liberation? Do you remember the protestors who gathered along expressways, boulevards, and streets in Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago, holding up posters and chanting things like, “Keep your moralizing out of our bedrooms,” “Pro-Choice Catholics,” “Keep your rosaries off our ovaries,” and “Go home…now”? Do you remember prominent American Catholics lecturing Pope John Paul II about shaping the Church according to their image and likeness? Do you remember when, on October 3, 1992, Sinead O’Connor appeared on Saturday Night Live as a musical guest? Singing an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War”—which she intended as a protest over the sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church—O’Connor changed the lyric “racism” to “child abuse” and then presented a photo of Pope John Paul II to the camera while singing the word “evil,” after which she tore the photo into pieces, said “fight the real enemy,” and threw the pieces towards the camera? Do you remember when, even after Pope John Paul II had died in 2005, fans at a Scottish Cup soccer game jeered during a minute’s silence in the late-Pope’s honor, forcing the tribute to be cut short halfway through because of the jeering? Those crowds weren’t comprised of young people. No, for the most part, they were comprised of adults. Twenty five years earlier, in a June 23, 1980 Newsweek article entitled “A Pope with Authority”—written two years into what would become John Paul II’s twenty-seven year papacy—George Will argued that what was behind all of the opposition to Pope John Paul II was his position that there is a truth and that the so-called “humility of intellect” so many have asserted masks their skepticism about truth. Will believed the Pope was coming under such fierce attack mostly because he directly challenged the presumed this generation’s “first truth,” namely, the idea that there really is no norm—no truth—and, for this reason, the Pope ought to conform the Church to contemporary values and practices. The reason why Pope John Paul II was “not particularly interested in modern ideas and problems”—meaning “modern is better than traditional”—Will noted in that article, is not because such ideas are “modern.” No, they simply are wrong. For John Paul II, what is true and what is false had absolutely nothing to do with time—traditional or modern—but solely with the truth. Many “modern” adult Catholics―those who belong to this “corrupt generation”―have ceased to believe the Church has any real mission in the world and that it has any right to demand that people submit to its faith and moral teaching. Instead, most of these Catholics regard themselves as what Joseph Sobran has termed “the world’s missionaries to the Church” (“Less Catholic than the Pope?” New York magazine, 1979, p. 12). What this means in actual practice is that traditional Catholicism, now judged largely impossible to live in the modern world, is to be jettisoned in favor of a less rigorous and certain Catholicism which stresses doctrines and practices emanating from secular society. These provide the criteria of truth, not any trans-historical or trans-cultural deposit of faith to which the Pope is responsible. But, young people weren’t buying into these and other intellectual deceits. They had heard their parent’s explanations about why the Church’s teaching didn’t apply in their lives and these young people observed the contradictions in their parent’s lives. Looking for the truth and Good Shepherds who would not shrink from preaching the truth and living it, all too many young people sadly discovered that they didn’t find those Good Shepherds in their parents, their teachers, their coaches, and in many of their priests as well. A pastor of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis-St. Paul surveyed his parishioners a year or so back about what they believed to be the most pressing issue that the parish needed to address. While finances might come to mind as the most pressing matter, they weren’t. Neither was it the quality of liturgy, music, vestments, worship environment. Nor was it the religious education of young people. No, the most pressing matter came in the form of a question, one asked for the most part by young people. That question? “What does it mean to be Catholic?” Do you remember when Pope John Paul II died? Remember the crowd numbering more than one million whose members filled not only St. Peter’s Square but also the entire length of Via della Conciliazione spanning from the Tiber River to St. Peter’s Square? Remember them chanting “Sancto Subito!” (“Saint Now!”)? More importantly, did you notice the majority of the crowd was young people? They listened. Perhaps some—I would hope many—heard. Forget the adults, John Paul II may well have been saying, as Fr. Lipp noted during that lunchtime conversation. Now it is time for young people to speak with clarity, conviction, and principle as well as to be eager and courageous by taking politically incorrect stands for your faith. During his long pontificate, John Paul had asked young people: Do you in your chests fear God more than your peers? Do you care more about fidelity to Scripture and Church teaching than about the latest upgrades to your IPods and cell phones? Do you believe Jesus came so that you “might have life and have it more abundantly”? In effect, what Pope John Paul II taught young people was “This is who we are and this what we believe. The Bible is God’s word and what the Church teaches in matters of faith and morals is the infallible truth. You must believe what we believe in order to join us. We’ve been this way for centuries and we’re not about to bend to the latest cultural winds. The Church will not adapt to you; no, you must adapt to the Church. If you don’t believe these things, you can’t make the A team. If you don’t like it, go elsewhere.” Did Pope John Paul II give up on adults, considering them part of this “corrupt generation”? I don’t know. What I am certain about, however, is that John Paul II bet his papacy on the goodness and idealism present in the souls of young people. It’s now up to our young people to restore punch to the word “Catholic” by making the faith, morals, and sacraments of the Church the center of your lives. “I am the gate,” Jesus told his disciples, “Whoever enters through me will be saved….” In a culture whose members do not want to be held accountable, young people know in their souls that vows, oaths, creeds, confessions, covenants, doctrinal statements, and statements of faith do mean something and not everything. These are the core values defining the Church, the sine qua non for admission and continued membership. Perhaps for adults, these basic words might not mean anything anymore. But, for young people, they are the pattern and way that you might have life and have it more abundantly. |
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HOMILY
