Some powerful words from the Holy Father speaking to pilgrims to WYD from his native Argentina in the Cathedral of San Sebastian in Rio de Janeiro. You can read his short address in its entirety here:
"Let me tell you what I hope will be the outcome of World Youth Day: I hope there will be noise. Here there will be noise, I’m quite sure. Here in Rio there will be plenty of noise, no doubt about that. But I want you to make yourselves heard in your dioceses, I want the noise to go out, I want the Church to go out onto the streets, I want us to resist everything worldly, everything static, everything comfortable, everything to do with clericalism, everything that might make us closed in on ourselves. The parishes, the schools, the institutions are made for going out ... if they don’t, they become an NGO, and the Church cannot be an NGO. May the bishops and priests forgive me if some of you create a bit of confusion afterwards. That’s my advice. Thanks for whatever you can do." Pope Francis
Note: this means bearing witness to Christ in a powerful way, like he used to do when he actually celebrated Mass and preached on the streets of Buenos Aires, when he rode the bus, etc. Take the Gospel to the streets! Bring Christ out to meet everyone. This why we are dismissed at the end of the Mass. Don't believe the silliness of faux dismissals, like "The Mass never ends, go in peace" (one that is [was?] popular at Teen Life masses). The Mass ends, Christ is in us, and He desires us to take Him to others. "Go in peace, proclaiming the Gospel of the Lord;" "Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life."
Servant of God, Madeleine Delbrel, pray for us! We the ordinary people of the streets.
He also had this to say, which puts some meat on the bones:
"Look, at this moment, I think our world civilization has gone beyond its limits, it has gone beyond its limits because it has made money into such a god that we are now faced with a philosophy and a practice which exclude the two ends of life that are most full of promise for peoples. They exclude the elderly, obviously. You could easily think there is a kind of hidden euthanasia, that is, we don’t take care of the elderly; but there is also a cultural euthanasia, because we don’t allow them to speak, we don’t allow them to act. And there is the exclusion of the young. The percentage of our young people without work, without employment, is very high and we have a generation with no experience of the dignity gained through work. This civilization, in other words, has led us to exclude the two peaks that make up our future. As for the young, they must emerge, they must assert themselves, the young must go out to fight for values, to fight for these values; and the elderly must open their mouths, the elderly must open their mouths and teach us! Pass on to us the wisdom of the peoples!"
Viva il Papa!
This kind of papal exhortation at WYD is not new. At the Vigil to begin WYD in 2005 in his native Germany, Pope Benedict spoke these words: "The saints, as we said, are the true reformers. Now I want to express this in an even more radical way: only from the saints, only from God does true revolution come, the definitive way to change the world....True revolution consists in simply turning to God who is the measure of what is right and who at the same time is everlasting love. And what could ever save us apart from love?"
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