'A civilization of love:' the pope in Denver.

By the time you read this the pope will have been long gone and the joyous, loving faces of the young people in Denver may have faded from our memories. But I hope that the absence of contention there and the determination to celebrate that which binds all Catholics will stay with us.

For many of us the quality of the response of the young who came to Denver (and of most of the adults who came with them) was unexpected. Unwittingly, perhaps, we have accepted the attitude adopted by much of the media--an attitude fed by a recent Gallup poll documenting the disagreement of many American Catholics with the teachings of the church. For example, James L. Franklin, writing in the Boston Globe (August 8) predicted that "there may not be as much enthusiasm for the pope's visit as there was at his first U.S. visit in 1979....Crowds were smaller when he returned in 1987 for a visit to the South and West."

Franklin quoted Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J., author of The Vatican and the American Hierarchy: "He comes at a time of a certain amount of demoralization in the American church, part of which was due to his conservatism and part due to a very low priestly morale, which is in turn due to the problem of sexual abuse."

Other stories anticipating the pope's coming stressed the misgivings of some young people. Not only did they take issue with the church on sexual issues but they felt that it was not "cool" to be Catholic. "If you go to church," said one college student, "you slip out of the dorm--you don't tell anyone where you're going." There were to be demonstrations by pro-choice Catholics, gays and lesbians, and the Women's Ordination Conference. Hostile cartoons appeared, and there were reports of ribald night club acts as well as a virtual field day of criticism on the radio talk shows. Some of us were formidably reminded of the old saying, "anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals." (While the pope was still in Jamaica before arriving in Mexico and then Denver, I was appalled at being approached by a prominent woman lawyer asking, in what I suppose was an attempt at humor, what I thought the "perp" was up to "lecturing us about violence.")

Even as the pope was being hailed by happy hundreds of thousands, newspaper headlines and TV news reports strove to make much of the pope's supposed surprising of President Bill Clinton by referring to abortion during their meeting. Apart from the fact that no reasonable reporter would expect the pope to avoid the issue, it was apparent that the pope's reference was almost oblique, only urging Americans to "defend life," and he certainly did not take issue with any specific Clinton stance. In fact, at one point he seemed to have made a tactful decision to eliminate the final words of a 1987 speech to which he referred: "and protect the human person from conception to natural death."

Meanwhile something very different was happening in Denver, something the commentators and anchors were missing but something very apparent to those watching the crowds and seeing their interaction with the pope, for whom their love was palpable. Queried, one after the other, whether they came from the varied regions of the United States or were youth delegates from abroad--France, Mexico, Italy, Pakistan--they struggled for the words to tell how they felt about the pope and what he meant to them. He was to them the personification of faith, "of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." He was the living symbol of the worldwide church in which they found their unity and identity. He was the emblem of the transcendent in their lives.

That which was ineffable superseded whatever they disagreed with in his teaching--and disagree they did in many instances. But that did not affect the love they found in his message and in the mission he entrusted to them. They were ready to build "the civilization of love" to which he summoned them. They were enthusiastic about taking up the task "of the defense of human life" (however they might interpret that) and "the promotion of human fights"; and they found the beginning of the "civilization of love" in his message itself.

There's such wonderful love in his message," said one eighteen-year-old American, echoing what many others had said, and a young woman from Uganda expressed what many others felt when she said that having seen and touched the pope, she knew she could return home and do the work of helping others of which he spoke. It was this rapport with the young--to some extent a newfound rapport--that impressed our American bishops more than his words.

The media, so obsessed by the apparent conflict between American Catholics and their church, might have been better prepared for the joy and love in Denver, had they listened to the Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, when he said, "After twenty-five years of what many view of confusion sometimes verging on chaos, I think people are ready for a celebration of continuity and stability and the vibrant ministry of the Catholic church" (Boston Globe, August 8).

As the days in Denver went by, the pope himself seemed warmed by the realization that the beginnings of his "civilization of love" already existed. It was perhaps this realization that caused him to expunge some of the sterner remarks from his final message, to depart from the text, and to reaffirm the celebration of faith and unity which was the Denver experience.