It's The Message, Stupid

(Hat tip: Fumare)

Colleen Carroll Campbell, writing at National Review Online, notes that the success of World Youth Day has always been about the message, NOT the messenger:

The Message Does Count
World Youth Day was never just about Pope John Paul II.

By Colleen Carroll Campbell

The conventional wisdom of secular journalists has long held that World Youth Day is a "Catholic Woodstock" born under Pope John Paul II and sustained by his personal charisma. The millions of young Catholics who have flocked to this global faith celebration for more than two decades like to party together and loved their late pope. But his defense of orthodox theology and traditional morality was never part of the appeal.

That explanation — that World Youth Day gatherings were successful in spite of the pope's message, not because of it — has survived in the mainstream media despite enormous evidence to the contrary. It took hold back in 1984, when 300,000 young pilgrims first answered Pope John Paul's invitation to travel to Rome and join him for a day of prayer. It persisted through 1987, when nearly one million converged on Buenos Aires, and in 1995, when four million flocked to Manila, making that gathering the largest ever recorded in history. The explanation even surfaced in media reports about World Youth Day 2002, when 82-year-old Pope John Paul was so crippled by Parkinson's that he struggled to walk and slurred his speech. Though he looked nothing like the handsome actor he had once been, many journalists continued to cite his penchant for performance — and not the content of his message — as the reason that 800,000 young pilgrims descended on Toronto to cheer and weep as he called them to conversion.

The world had a chance to test that hypothesis last week, when Cologne hosted the 20th World Youth Day and the first without its founder. In place of John Paul now stood a new pontiff, a shy, cerebral man with considerably less star appeal. Unlike his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI would not meet young pilgrims as a relatively young man or have a quarter century to court them. He would face them for the first time at age 78, while standing in the long shadow of the only pope they had ever known. If the success of World Youth Day was predicated on the persona of John Paul, then surely this meeting in Cologne would fall flat.

Instead, it was a resounding success.

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