Truth is the heart of the Pope's message.

What should one make of the extraordinary events of "World Youth Day" which, as I write, have just concluded? It will take months, perhaps years, or even decades, to fully assess their impact, but to this (far from young!) observer, it seemed more than a success, almost a kind of contemporary miracle.

From the moment that his plane rolled to a stop on the tarmac, Pope John Paul II confounded the official arbiters of Canadian opinion, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Just as their reporter on the scene was explaining how the Pope would be hydraulically lifted from the plane and lowered to the ground, in the doorway there appeared a winsome, bent old man, dressed in white, a combination of pain and determination etched upon his face, who step by slow step made his way down what seemed the world's longest staircase. "A soul leading a body", was how George Weigel aptly described the scene.

Yet for the next week, the big story to the CBC was an Oriental spiky-haired boy, who tried (without evident success) to interest young delegates in an offer of free condoms. Dr. Thomas Langan of the Catholic Civil Rights League commented: "It is rather a pity that the CBC cannot control its anti-Catholic tendencies for a mere week."

Once on terra firma His Holiness made some pleasantly innocuous remarks about Canada, at which Prime Minister Chretien beamed, but then, like the hook's flange, came unequivocal words: "You are enriched by the different cultural elements that make up your society, but the core of your heritage is the spiritual and transcendent vision of life based on Christian revelation."

Like so many of the Pope's words these are simple. They stick in our throats because they are true, and we have grown unaccustomed in Canada ever to hearing truth.

Truth is the heart of the Pope's message; to a society that has already embraced relativism ("Different strokes for different folks"), His Holiness reminds us that there are verities, eternal and unchanging. There is truth. And at the epicentre of truth stands the person of Jesus Christ, who said "I am the truth".

Archbishop Aloysius Ambrozic sounded the same theme at the opening mass. To more than 200,000 young people--indoctrinated since kindergarten in the view that everything is relative, that your truth is as good as mine--the Archbishop said: "We must refuse to feign the politically correct tolerance which imagines all religions and convictions and values are equally valid. Through us the world is to be drawn to Jesus, and through Him to the Father."

From Toronto, the Pope was taken to Strawberry Island in Lake Simcoe for what was billed as "rest and recuperation". Far from it! Instead he whisked about by boat meeting residents, and stopping to dispense a special blessing at a home for the mentally handicapped.

In his first sermon, the Pope told the assembled youth: "Dear friends, the aged Pope, full of years but still young at heart, answers your youthful desire for happiness with words that are not his own....Christ has the answer to this desire of yours. But he asks you to trust him. True joy is a victory, something which cannot be obtained without a long and difficult struggle. Christ holds the secret of this victory."

And the Pope's youthful audience, from every corner of the globe, listened and prayed. I confess that I had abandoned hope of ever hearing such words or witnessing such scenes in Canada.

What explains it? Well, the Holy Spirit primarily. But there is something else: the response of youth to a confrontation with truth. In the Pope, they saw Christ's representative on earth, and as those first 12 apostles found the Master's words irresistible, so too did the world's youth harken to the Pope's message.

What a mistake it would have been had the Pope ever yielded to the intense pressures to make the Roman Catholic church "relevant": to ordain women, to sanction birth control, to bless gay "marriages". In other words, had the Roman Catholic church followed the same path as the pitiful Protestant denominations, there would have been no World Youth Day. The Pope would have been a hero to the CBC, but his church would be largely empty, and the youth of the world would be searching elsewhere for answers.

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario, London, ON.