BENEDICT’S BENEDICTION

And so the World Youth Day Week is over. The Pope has gone. Benedict the 16th left Australia aboard a Qantas jet today – an event covered live and interminably by SKY news.  Endless shots of a Qantas jet taxiing and taxiing and then taking off.It was indicative of the relentless media coverage of the papal visit in which television and newspapers seemed to become an extension of the Catholic Church PR department.

Parts of it were spectacular. And moving. The re-enactment of the Stations of the Cross and the Crucifixion of Christ in the street of Sydney was powerful theatre. The outdoor mass at Randwick Racecourse yesterday with another crowd at Centennial Park was undoubtedly the biggest religious event Australia has seen or probably will ever see. An estimated 400,000 people at Randwick after more than 200,000 young believers had been there for a candlelight vigil and concert the night  before.

Pope Benedict did publicly apologise at the Mass to sexual victims of his own priests. And he met privately with three victims today. It was a strong unequivocal apology.

He said: ‘Indeed, I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them that, as their pastor, I too, share in their suffering. Victims should receive compassion and care, and those responsible for these evils must be brought to justice’.

You hope his Sydney Archbishop Cardinal George Pell was listening and World Youth Day organiser Bishop Anthony Fraser who cruelly dismissed victims’ pain as ‘crankiness’ and old news.

One thing that did strike me again and again throughout a week of pageantry and pomp and lavish costumes --and you must take this criticism as the words of an atheist and a cynic – was the pure misogyny of it all.

You looked out at a sea of young faces full of hope and trust and religious zeal. Probably more than half of them were female. And you looked back at the dais and the VIP seats. And they were full of fat old men in red dresses. Not a woman in sight. As the religion dictates there cannot be.

Balding old men in their frocks and hats, teetering along in their dotage, with no relevance to the youth of today especially young women .

Did those girls, treating the Pope like some rock star, even think for a moment that not one of them could ever be up there. Not as a Pope, not as a cardinal, nor a bishop, not even a parish priest.

Banned forever by their church doctrine to be hand-maidens. And inferior beings.

Even though, Cardinal Pell in his words yesterday used a feminine term to describe his church. He said: ‘At World Youth Day the church appears as SHE truly is – alive with evangelical energy’.

Sadly, not so much ‘evangelical energy’ that in 2008 women can be treated as equal with equal standing, equal status, equal opportunity.

Such ingrained chauvinism must truly test any female Catholic’s faith. It’s been bad enough being told what you can and can’t do with your own body. What you can and can’t do about contraception.

World Youth Day euphoria changed none of that.

Monday, July 21, 2008

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008