Choristers in the night.

Hugh Ballantyne's excellent account of his leading a large group of young choristers in the dark through the milling thousands of World Youth Day pilgrims makes it seem that their arrival at their designated place on or near the stage at Downsview required a minor miracle. My only criticism of his account is that I think he is too hard on Peter Mansbridge. Granted, the CBC gave too much prominence to the lady Cardinals who were ever ready to correct the Holy Father's errors, and to the thin young man who wanted to set a world record for the distribution of condoms. But we should all be grateful to Peter Mansbridge and Alison Smith for the part they played in making the Way of the Cross such a memorable experience. They were moved by the performance, as all of us listeners were, and their commentary had nothing grudging or distasteful about it. They deserve high praise for their part in making this event such an amazing success.

Editor

The coverage of World Youth Day by the print and television media told us a lot about the media, but not so much about religion. I was at Downsview on Sunday morning. What I, and several hundred thousand other persons, experienced there was entirely different from what we later saw on TV and read in the newspapers. The mass media all got the story wrong. And apparently they got it wrong on purpose. The World Youth Day story is not about sex; nor is it about dissent in the Church. The experience of the youngsters in the choir may serve to illustrate what really happened. That reality was religious; and the mass media, like the noonday devil whom they serve, hate religion.

At 3:00 a.m. on Sunday morning two hundred boys from Saint Michael's Choir School, together with a small group of teachers and volunteers, assembled at a mustering point in downtown Toronto. I sing in the choir and I was one of the volunteers. The boys ranged in age from eight to eighteen. At 3:30 we embarked for the exhibition grounds downtown in order to form a convoy with the World Youth Day Choir and proceed to Downsview. The buses for the other choir showed up late, and they were empty. The other choir had made different arrangements. After waiting for them for a while, we continued on our way. Before our pilgrimage was to end, we would go for six hours without food, twelve hours without a hot meal, and a night without sleep. No problem; we knew about that when we signed on.

What we didn't know about was the long walk. At Downsview we were supposed to drive onto the grounds to a staging area behind the main dais, where our tent was located next to the tents of the bishops and the cardinals. By an administrative snafu we were directed to the wrong gate.

At five in the morning we disembarked from the buses, to face a difficult situation. We were nearly a mile from our tent; we had two hundred boys in our care; and the night was very dark. There were no visible landmarks and there was no hint of dawn. Between us and the dais there were several hundred thousand pilgrims, with tens of thousands more flooding in through every gate. We only had one option, start hiking.

We formed the boys into a line, and we set forth on our passover journey through the night. The first and last persons held up their music folders in order to mark the ends of the line. If your arm got tired, you held the music up with the other arm. Groups of small boys wandered off and had to be herded back. We raced up and down like sheep dogs, trying to keep the boys in formation. Other people were constantly breaking through our line. Many spoke no English. The sea of humanity filled every open space.

Then it began to rain. The heavens opened, and the dry ground soon turned into mud. When we had begun the journey earlier that morning, we were clean and dry. Within seconds, we were soaked and dirty. We kept on walking. There was no other option. As one boy said, "If this was easy, it wouldn't be a pilgrimage".

At the first security point each of us was scanned. The guards opened a second line to get us through faster. We formed up again and continued. A second security check. And a third. And a fourth. At one of them a police officer asked me to stand inside the perimeter and identify the boys instead of verifying each separate ID. I stood there and I said, "Yes, yes, yes", as one chorister after another passed through.

We were now inside the high-security zone. We were walking along a lane, and a van came toward us with a man in the passenger seat. It was Peter Mansbridge from the CBC. He looked at us with a smile. He was also clean and dry, which didn't help. ]I heard a boy behind me in the line growl, "Mansbridge". There was a note of anger in the voice. The van didn't stop. I'm sure Peter Mansbridge is a fine fellow. But the Choir School gets beaten up regularly in the Toronto media, and I reckon these boys know who their friends are.

The mass media came to World Youth Day in order to reheat their tired old. story on sexual scandal and dissent in the Church. Instead, three- quarters of a million young people from all over the world forced the media to confront a larger truth. I wanted to run back and say, "Hey, Mansbridge, how does it feel to get mugged by reality?" But I didn't. I had to stay in line.

At about seven o'clock we finally reached our tent, and we stepped in from the rain. We sat down and each one of us began to devour whatever food he had brought. We had been told to bring water with us; so now at least we were able to stop lugging that heavy load. In fact the only commodity in endless supply inside the high-security zone at Downsview was bottled water. Dozens of cases of the stuff were never opened.

Dawn broke on a cloudy day, and the rain stopped. We had brought two hundred boys nearly a mile through a crowd of more than five hundred thousand people in the night and in the rain. If you asked me beforehand, I would have said, "Can't be done. Too risky". Providence took the choice out of our hands, and then watched over us and over the little ones in our care. All present and correct.

We had a short while to rest now, before heading over to the grandstand. I went out to stretch my legs. At the entrance to the cardinals' tent I saw Cardinal Ambrozic, talking to a group of young nuns. Later that day, I was to see Cardinal Lehmann from Germany talking to another group of young nuns. How did I know they were nuns? They were wearing religious habits. The older Catholic orders of women, who have discarded their habit, are no longer attracting young vocations. Never mind. That's a story for another day. I stepped back into the tent and waited.

At eight o'clock we formed up once again, and we walked over to the grandstand. We climbed up a rickety staircase at the back and emerged onto the main dais. Then we climbed still higher till we reached our places behind the rows set aside for bishops. I gazed out over an endless ocean of young people from all over the world. I was filled with passionate emotion. I thought, "When the Holy Father arrives I'm going to start crying. And that's fine."

The weather could not have been worse. There were black clouds all along the western horizon. A terrible wind began to blow. It pulled huge balloons off their mooring lines; it picked up lesser objects from the ground and flung them away toward the north. The scaffolding of the grandstand heaved and shuddered. The fabric roof rattled with a sound like a machine gun. I thought, "If this thing collapses, we're all dead". Quite so. But we had work to do, work infinitely more important than that little anxiety. It began to rain again. The wind whipped rainwater off the roof and sent whole puddles flying through the air. It was difficult to look at the music in our folders, because the wind wanted to pull the pages from our hands. Out in the vast multitude, folk hunkered down and waited. Nobody left. We knew what we were hearing; we recognised the sound. This was the sound from heaven like a mighty wind, of which the Bible speaks. It is the sound of the Holy Spirit coming down.

A helicopter appeared on the big TV monitors. A roar went up throughout the crowd. Choirboys rose from their places and raced to the wall at the side of the dais in order to peer up at the sky. They stood on the ubiquitous cases of bottled water in order to see over the top of the wall. Wrong helicopter. A decoy, somebody said. The singer next to me nudged and pointed. High up at the top of the scaffolding police sharpshooters were climbing out onto the roof like ninja monkeys. More helicopters appeared. Then the TV monitors focused in on one helicopter and stayed with it. The boys were told to remain in their places, but they ran to the side to look out anyway. My chair was at the end of a row, and I'm tall; so I could see well. A choirboy asked me to lift him up. It was fifty feet to the ground. "I don't think so", I said. Anyway, he was in grade 12.

At one point Father Tom Rosica, the CEO of World Youth Day, came up to our choir and spoke to the conductor. The conductor beckoned to a boy called Milo, president of the student council. Milo didn't know what was happening. We knew well enough. Milo was going to meet the Pope. When Milo returned to his place afterwards, he had a smile that went right around his head. Other boys tried to get close to him, as if the papal effect was transmissible. Maybe it is.

The Pope's helicopter landed just behind us. The Pope disembarked and he climbed into the popemobile to begin a wide circuit through the multitude. Everybody wanted to see him, to gaze at him. Eventually the popemobile came around to the back of the grandstand and it disappeared underneath. I had an urgent need of another sort; so I decided to take this opportunity and race to the washroom. When I came out I had to force my way back through a throng of people to recover my place in the choir. I reached the end of the passageway, and a large police officer stopped me. "Wait", he said. And there, not ten feet away from me, the Pope passed by. Milo and three other young people were pushing him on a wheeled platform. They led the Holy Father out toward the front of the dais. The crowd saw him and went wild.

On the western horizon the sky was now blue. The wind died down, the rain stopped, and the sun came out.

The storm blew itself away toward the east. The eucharistic liturgy began. During his homily the Pope mentioned the grief which he had suffered as the result of recent scandals. Don't lose your faith over this issue, he said. "Love the Church, as you love Jesus". And he said many other things besides, which are too numerous to write down here.

What was the media take on all this? Before the event, there were two stories. The first story was that this World Youth Day would be a disappointment because so few people were coming. After Sunday, that story got spiked and we read instead about the biggest gathering of people ever in the history of Canada.

The second story was about sex. Variations of that story ran every day before, during, and after the papal visit. On Monday morning the Globe and Mail news service on the internet declared, "Top Story: Pope expresses shame and sadness". Maybe they should look at the videotapes again.

On Sunday evening CTV ran a summary of the day's events. When they were not interrupting for commercials, they interrupted every thirty minutes for the news of the day. Guess what the top story was. Every time.

On Monday morning even the National Post fell into the trap. On page one of the paper, and on the National Post web page, the top story was: Pope confronts 'sin' of sex abuse. Well, I was sitting behind the Pope during that homily and I didn't hear him put the word 'sin' in quotation marks.

Again and again during the last week, both newspapers and TV networks turned away from the reality of World Youth Day, and focused instead on dissenting countergroups. What was wrong with the Pope's homily? Well, he didn't apologize and offer compensation to the victims. The process of forgiveness therefore cannot begin. Without an infusion of cash, we cannot have closure. In this variation, the top story about what the Pope said is what the Pope did not say.

Privately owned media can do whatever they want. It's a free market. The CBC is publicly owned and funded by the people of Canada, and it ought not to tell fibs about religion. If you haven't figured it out yet, Mr. Mansbridge, here's the top story about last Sunday morning. The Pope is old and sick. He can't stand up straight, and he can barely walk or talk. In Downsview eight hundred thousand people, most of them young, and from all over the world, gathered with inexpressible joy and with heartfelt love to join him in prayer and to listen to him talk about the Lord. Is there something here that you don't understand?+

Hugh Ballantyne is a retired lawyer and teacher. He sings in the choir at St. Michael's Cathedral in Toronto. His paper on the historic origins of priestly celibacy will appear in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review next year.