Our Hopes for Southern Africa’s Youth Day

For many young Catholics, attending the huge World Youth Day gatherings is a dream goal; for most of them, however, that aspiration will not be realised.

The cost of travelling to a host city in another continent is prohibitive for most young South Africans, unless they come from a financially secure background, or have employment which makes international travel affordable, or benefit from the generosity of others through sponsorship or fundraising.

This is a pity, since the potential benefits of attending World Youth Days are abundant, for the individual pilgrims as well as for their communities. This is why many parishes fundraise to send young parishioners to these events.

Most Catholics who have taken part in a World Youth Day will testify to its faith-strengthening properties which go beyond getting a glimpse of the pope.

They will remember the parties and music, but also the reverence with which Catholic youths approached the sacraments, particularly those of the Eucharist and Reconciliation.

They will also recall being inspired by the catechetical sessions, often delivered by bishops, and the sense of fellowship that bonded Catholics from across the globe, even when they spoke no mutual language.

These three elements are essential in building and maintaining a strong sense of the Catholic faith, and through it building a meaningful relationship with Jesus: to have the sacraments as a central part of faith-life, to know and understand what the Church teaches (and what it doesn’t), and to have the concrete experience of being in communion with the People of God.

Young Catholics today are under immense pressure to abandon their faith, by proselytising churches and by aggressive Western secularism.

To resist these pressures, young Catholics need a developed faith, a strong Catholic identity and a sense of belonging to the Catholic faith community.

World Youth Days equip participants with these qualities. The initiative by the bishops of Southern Africa to stage a regional version of World Youth Day therefore must be commended and strongly supported.

As we report this week, the SA Youth Day will be held from December 3-6 in Walkerville, near Johannesburg.

It will mostly follow the structure of World Youth Day events: Mass, catechetical sessions, opportunity for confession, prayer, religious processions, cultural events, encounters and so on.

The event will bring together youths from all over South Africa, Botswana and Swaziland who will experience an extraordinary sense of fellowship. No doubt they will grow in their faith, and hopefully they will pass the benefits of their participation on to parish communities.

There are limitations, however. The appointed venue, the Salesians’ Bosco Youth Centre, has place for only a finite number of participants. This means that each diocese is limited to only 65 delegates, bringing the maximum number of participants to just under 2000.

Obviously, most people who would like to take part will not be able to do so, and there doubtless will be disappointments. This is unavoidable, but it is wise that the bishops first test what kind of demand exists for an SA Youth Day, and determine what capacity the local Church has to stage such an event, and on what scale.

St John Paul II took a similarly cautious approach when he launched the first couple of World Youth Days in the 1980s. Demand and the accumulation of experience allowed the expansion of the format, to the point that now some World Youth Days draw international crowds into the millions.

We may hope that in time the SA Youth Day will likewise grow proportionately in popularity, and with it the local Church’s logistical capacity.

It must be the prayer of all the local Church that this will be the first event in what will grow to become a popular tradition in the formation of future generations of Catholics.