Cardinal Ambrozic acknowledges symbolism. (News in Brief).

Toronto--Interviewed by Michael Valpy of the Globe and Mail on May 18, 2002, Cardinal Ambrozic discussed why, in a secular and anti-institutional world, World Youth Days attract so many young people as they do--one million in Paris in 1997, two million in Rome in 2000.

World Youth Days, he said, reach back to a Christianity that is largely pre-Vatican II and almost pre-Enlightenment. They are pilgrimages and communal spiritual experiences, he said, and they are very much a theological creation of John Paul.

He said that his visit to the 1993 Youth Day in Denver was a very useful corrective to his own post-Vatican II theology: "I found these young people living in their own world of symbols. These young people brought to me the reality of people needing one another, of seeking the communal, loving large crowds, something I don't pay much attention to.

"For me, the abstractions are important. The postconciliar tendency has been heavily influenced by theologians (who favour) a kind of individualist approach ...with insufficient attention paid to human community."

The training in seminaries, and his own theological training, he said, was analytical. It atrophies the sense of the symbolic. My sense of the symbolic was diminished. In postconciliar theology, the parable of the prodigal son would be presented as a lecture on pig farming. In other words, the symbolism would be lost, and instead there would be an analysis of what the prodigal son did when he went out in the fields to feed the swine. So Vatican II contributed to a radical lessening of a very important feature of Catholic spiritual life: "The preconciliar Church delighted in the senses. The postconciliar church is shockingly analytic with a barren inner landscape."

So events like World Youth Days, with their processions and popular devotions like the rosary, Stations of the Cross, and veneration of the saints, nourish the senses; they are an understandable reaction to postconciliar cerebralism.

But no one trend, the Cardinal said, does entire justice to the richness of the faith.

Comment:

We doubt that the Cardinal would have blamed Vatican II for these developments; rather it was the post-Vatican II outbreak of dissent and criticism which mocked religious symbolism and devotions.