Scottish Catholic Observer

By David Kerr

Born in a storm. Saturday, August 20 2011. Madrid. The BXVI Generation.  As the lightening storm lashed across Cuatro Vientos airbase the voices of two million exceptionally drenched young people began to compete with the Spanish thunder—Esta es la juventud del papa! Esta es la juventud del papa! This is the youth of the Pope! This is the youth of the Pope!  And as those youthful chants rose to the skies, the downpour suddenly abated.

“Thank you for your joy and resistance. Your strength is greater than the rain,” Pope Benedict said to the World Youth Day pilgrims. “The Lord sends you lots of blessings with the rain.”

Moments later the crowd was as quickly becalmed as the weather as Pope Benedict led the vast congregation in adoration of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.  Movingly, the overwhelming majority of young pilgrims chose to reverently kneel in the Madrid mud.

“Dear young people, in these moments of silence before the Blessed Sacrament, let us raise our minds and hearts to Jesus Christ, the Lord of our lives and of the future,” the Pope said as the strains of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus began to accompany plumes of incense heavenwards.

They prayed together. They listened together. In the word of the Pope they had ‘lived an adventure together.’ And in this dramatic half-hour was forged a union of hearts between two-million young people and an 84-year-old German Pope—the BXVI Generation was born.  What then are the hallmarks of this new breed of believers?

Having reported on several Papal visits over the past year—and even worked on one—there seem to be a couple of consistent themes which emerge during the travels of Pope Benedict XVI.

The first is his message to civil society on the compatibility of faith and reason. Witness, for example, his Westminster Hall address in London last September. Face-to-face with the cultural elite of each land, this scholarly Pope challenges the common intellectual assumption—born of the Enlightenment—that faith and reason are mutually exclusive or even downright hostile one to the other. Thus, through respectful dialogue and intelligent debate, Pope Benedict hopes to win-over the mind of the West away from a ‘dictatorship of relativism’ which he sees as the greatest threat to both the Church and humanity.

“Although the dominant culture of relativism all around us has given up on the search for truth, even if it is the highest aspiration of the human spirit,” he told the young people at Cuatro Vientos just minutes before the rains came.

“We need to speak with courage and humility of the universal significance of Christ as the Saviour of humanity and the source of hope for our lives.”

This approach has won Pope Benedict respect even from prominent intellectual opponents such as the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.  Writing this week in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, the Peruvian writer praised Benedict as ‘probably the most cultured and intelligent Pope that the Church has had in a long time, one of the few Popes whose encyclicals and books an agnostic like me can read without yawning.’ Praise, of sorts, indeed.

The second consistent theme to emerge during Pope Benedict’s travels is his recurrent challenge to young people to be ‘the future saints of the 21st century.’

While never shying away from contentious contemporary ethical issues, Pope Benedict is always keen to stress to young people that Christianity is not primarily a moral code or even a philosophy but an encounter with a person—Jesus Christ.

“To abide in His love, then, means living a life rooted in faith, since faith is more than the mere acceptance of certain abstract truths,” he explained at Cuatro Vientos.

“It is an intimate relationship with Christ, who enables us to open our hearts to this mystery of love and to live as men and women conscious of being loved by God.”

It was these two ‘Benedictine’ themes—His appeal to both heart and head—that seem to be imprinted upon this new generation of young Catholics. Yes, it is built on the legacy of Pope John Paul II but it is now more than just a linear continuation of that legacy.

In fact, during my week in Madrid I was repeatedly surprised and edified by the intellectual breadth and spiritual depth of this emergent counter-cultural generation—there sheer number too.

Unlike with many Catholics of my generation, the dominant secular-liberal nostrums of contemporary Western culture appeared to hold little or no sway over them. In fact, they seemed fairly settled in their opinion that this ‘culture of death’ was now intellectually bankrupt. Instead, they were simply eager to start building a new ‘civilisation of love.’

So when anti-Catholic protesters taunted and attacked such youngsters in central Madrid on the Wednesday night I was humbled to witness these young Catholics confidently stand their ground and, with great dignity, turn solely to peaceful prayer as a response to those who clearly wished them harm.

On the whole, this BXVI Generation hail from parishes and diocese around the world that have prioritised an intelligent catechises of the young in recent years. I came across a very impressive group of young pilgrims from St Margaret’s in Clydebank at the Papal Mass on the Sunday morning. What is more, with Pope Benedict now consistently promoting dynamic, orthodox figures—such as Bishop Hugh Gilbert to Aberdeen—it is a trend that is only likely to gather pace in coming years.

I end, though, not in the words of Pope Benedict but in the words of a 19-year-old student called Joe Duca from Virginia in the US. Why? Because he provides an eloquent but far from untypical snapshot of those youngsters I met throughout my week at World Youth Day 2011 in Madrid.

“I think our culture is really about selfish old people who want to preserve the way that they have trapped themselves into a loveless life and they want to justify that and are imposing that on us. And it is our job to fight it not with anger but by showing our fellow Christians—and particularly our fellow youth—the love we all want and that it’s to be found in Christ Jesus.”