WYD Lisbon One-Year Later

16/8/2024

I will endeavour in this personal, reflective piece not to repeat things that I have already written much about before.

LISBON World Youth Day Week started on a Tuesday, 1 August 2023, which makes keeping track of events personally in one’s mind rather difficult. Later on, at times one could be forgiven for the honest mistake of losing, or even gaining, a day on your internal calendar.

Opening the Week was the get-together, catch-up and sing-song of the Australia Gathering : an event more geared towards schoolies and schoolies-at-heart than for those seeking quiet, whilst I utterly failed to not be sunburnt a second time on pilgrimage. (Venice being the first.)

The whole week, and events, and talks, of World Youth Day (WYD) is a marathon and not a sprint; and I was burning more energy and mental capacity than I was recovering in what little moments of quiet recharging there were to begin with.

WYD is not what one would call ‘introvert-friendly’ by any personal measure. Nor is it amenable to diabetics or children of diabetic parents—especially when there is no clear idea of when the day’s Mass was to actually start for a person to be able to figure out whether they were inside or outside of the one-hour fast before Mass and be able to act accordingly.

Personally, it is very hard—almost impossible—to keep up with others when you are emotionally and physically exhausted before mid-day and your strongest, inmost desire is to just go somewhere far away from the thronging crowds and just huddle down in peace, quiet, and shade to recover.

Missing breakfast on the second day because of such exhaustions the previous day is also not a recipe for congenial interactions with others, peer-to-peer or otherwise. Mea culpa.

ALSO, it is suffocating to one’s already stressed psyche when self-autonomy is curtailed (e.g. “You can not under any circumstances go to events or places by yourself.”) when all you want to do is go straight back to the hotel and get out of the heat because you are already overloaded but your group has decided to look inside churches on the way, instead.

Please be under no illusion, I do appreciate the need to keep people together for everyone’s personal safety and security (and insurance protocols…). But surely there must some better way to balance keeping track of everyone and an individual’s internal idea of safety being to get out of the crowds and temperatures that they are struggling amongst.

Communication to normal (i.e., non-group leading) pilgrims was, at times, let down by conflicting or insufficient streams of information about what the day’s schedules were or what was, or was not, permitted by the Pilgrim Leadership, which left those pilgrims who do not always live their lives by the seat of their pants (far from it) at a disadvantage as to knowing what they needed to plan or prepare for ahead of time.

Conscientious planners and World Youth Days do not mix well.

THE good of WYD Week was indoors and away from the hot sun on the Friday, Day 4, for the third Catechesis session with the Bishop of Dallas, Texas, Edward ‘Ed’ Burns speaking on the topic of Mercy, God’s loving mercy.

From my experience of living this WYD, this was the mountain top—the church where this session was held is literally built on a hill—before going through Calvary, which for me was the whole weekend of the WYD Vigil.

STAKING out plots of turf in the Iberian sun at the WYD Vigil site for the rest of the Diocesan pilgrims with the Advance Team, was an opportunity offered to me. I accepted it, glad to have not placed myself in a position where I would’ve been far more likely to have blown my top at someone due to the overarching heat of the day, namely the long Pilgrim Walk from Lisbon centre to the Vigil site on the banks of the Tejo (Tagus) River.

Prior to Pope Francis arriving and the Vigil starting, there were all sorts of talks, testimonies and musical interludes. The one that stuck in my craw most was everyone being asked questions by representatives of an International Youth body that was the ‘fruit of’ the 2018 Youth Synod, questions that were specifically prompting ‘Yes’ answers from listeners in a call and response method, without really giving anyone time to reflect upon the questions and give real, honest answers. Rigged “questionnaires” that have only one option are not honest nor something one should expect to see in the Catholic Church let alone WYD.

Being hemmed in and surrounded, virtually on all sides, by all the other pilgrims around me at the Vigil site and the near constant music—which I wished to God would have stopped—gave me sensory overload which put my body into adrenaline-fueled survival-mode for the rest of the weekend. I only really started calming down internally when we were in Fátima on our post-WYD ‘retreat’. As it was, taking photographs was the only thing that I had any control over and so used that as a way of distracting myself from the discomforts that I had chosen (many months ago) to be in that night.

Pope Francis’ motorcade entered the Vigil site at around 8:30 pm. Once on the Vigil stage the Pope listened to two testimonies: one from a local Portuguese priest and the other from a young woman from northern Mozambique who had survived an attack by Islamist insurgents on her village. (In all honesty I had forgotten that either of these testimonies had happened and only really recalled them when I was looking up online reports about the Vigil to jog my memory for this piece.)

What little I do remember of Francis’ Vigil Address to the youth was the on-the-fly translation by the volunteer English interpreter over our group’s portable radio/speaker:

‘Joy is Missionary’
‘…become roots of Joy’
‘You don’t find joy closed up in a library’
‘…we have to find a key for it.’ — ‘Have you gotten tired? …when you feel like a wet sponge…?’ which got a round of laughs from the Pope’s imitation of a lethargic, wet sponge.
‘…when you see a friend fallen down, pick them up. Powerfully pick them up!’
‘…the only time we look down on someone is when we are helping them up again!’

AFTER the Address there was a drone light show displaying the 2023 WYD Theme “Rise Up” in multiple languages before we went into Adoration of Our Blessed Lord in the Eucharist.

The assembled symphony and choir were a true highlight, giving it their all. Then came the blessed (in both ways) silence in the moment of pause during Adoration where one could’ve heard a pin drop echo throughout the whole Vigil site, across the river beside us, and beyond.

The only upset to all of this was kneeling down on the aggregate that the site was built atop. What amount of grass that had been put down had been all but burnt by the Iberian sun over the course of the WYD Week leaving only the odd tuft of hardy grass root and a plethora of bits of rock ranging from golf ball to house brick-size. After all of the miles it had been flown and transported across Italy, the sleeping bag I had bought specifically for the Vigil ended up being used as little more than padding for both my knees and posterior. (As I write this, it still remains unopened from the day it was bought at the camping warehouse.)

Following Pope Francis’ farewell to the crowd there was post-Adoration music from about 10:30 pm led by one Padre (Father) Duarte Rosado and his guitar. The music finished at 11:43 pm at which time we were then audibly water-boarded until 1:06 am(!) by an ecological propaganda film flying under the guise of Laudato Si’. Because it was in English there was no escape for any of us English-speakers who are already quite sick to death of this sort of emotional blackmailing that we have already experienced ad nauseam back home in our respective countries.

I didn’t need more kindling for my already overworked emotional barometer. I wanted—wished for silence, for the blazing glare of a thousand suns of the Vigil site floodlights to be switched off (keeping only the necessary ones over the main thoroughfares between sectors turned on), for all of the music to stop, for sleep—to not be alone in a sea of people, even amongst those that I had walked through Italy with. It’s alienating to be stuck sitting on a still rolled-up sleeping bag inside of an almost 2-foot-square patch of ground surround by an array of bodies all packed in like a human game of Tetris, all of them appearing to be sleeping despite the adverse conditions.

I tried sleeping, but I couldn’t. The mid-night air was so cold that it numbed me to my very bones. Admittedly it was nowhere near as freezing as I remember it having been in Randwick for Sydney WYD 2008—nothing compares to how cold a night that was.

So I ended up walking back and forth from the sector our Diocese had been placed in (A5) to the banks of plywood toilet cubicles two sectors over for what felt like a dozen round trips throughout the rest of the night, in-between tip-toeing through sleeping pilgrims to get to the water station to refill my water bottle and trying not to turn into a human icicle whilst sitting huddled down on the ground.

During the course of that night a veteran pilgrim gave me an unused space blanket of theirs to keep warm under and we later ended up doing Night Prayer and reading the approaching morning’s Gospel Readings for the Mass whilst walking between our sector and the toilets.

In spite of my intention not to do so, I ended up seeing dawn break over the Tejo River in real time during a solo return journey from the toilets.

My attempts at trying to eat breakfast were mostly scuppered by my stomach, still in survival-mode, being more clenched than a duck’s behind and leaving me wishing that I’d eaten more of the Pilgrim Vigil Provisions the night before. Then as the sun was fully emerged from below the horizon line the “wake-up” call was sounded across the assembled mass of pilgrims at 6:30 am in the form of classical and “doof-doof” music remixing by the DJ Padre himself (whom I had never heard of before Lisbon WYD), Fr Guilherme Peixoto.

Pope Francis arrived soon after 8 am, greeting the crowds of pilgrims from the open-top Mercedes G-class Popemobile (no, I am not a petrol-head, I just like being thorough) before being whisked behind the stage to prepare for the World Youth Day Mass on the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord Jesus. I did have to force myself through a barricade of WYD volunteers to get back into our sector from visiting the toilets the last time before Mass after the Portuguese police had told the organisers to lockdown the site for the Pope’s arrival. I was not alone in wanting to get out of the pathway and back into the sector. One of those organizational hiccups, I guess.

What I mainly remember of the Mass is standing around in the rocky earth under the mid-morning to mid-day sun. If it hadn’t been for the heat and the previous night I might have laughed at the end of the Mass with how almost comical it was with the litany of “after-Mass announcements”, ranging from thank-yous to invitations to the 2025 Year of Jubilee in Rome and then—finally—what everyone (who wasn’t curial clergy) was waiting to hear: the announcement and reveal of Seoul as being the next host of WYD in 2027.

And then came the cauldron of making and surviving our way in small, separate Diocesan pilgrim groups through the absolute crush of people to get out of the WYD Vigil site and head back to our hotel in Lisbon.

Amongst the small group of pilgrims I was with, it was a non-stop trek through the local streets and boulevards to the (ahem) nearby Oriente Station and then forcing ourselves through the police-controlled scrum of people trying to get into the station itself to return to their own accommodations as well. I think that there was definitely a Grace of God upon us as we walked through those streets to the station without stopping but just continuing on and on, pushing away any form of exhaustion as we made towards our stated goal.

Alighting from the Lisbon Metro we arrived at Marquês de Pombal Square—where we had gathered before to welcome Pope Francis to Lisbon and participated in the Stations of the Cross—and finally got both a foot and a seat inside the air-conditioned McDonald’s, where we had lunch and cooled down on soft-serve ice creams. What had once been a buzzing throng of international pilgrims outside was now a virtual ghost-town save for the workers continuing to take down the scaffolding for the Welcome Stage and all of the sightscreens dotted in and around Eduardo VII Park.

Gathering ourselves, we made the short walk back to our hotel and to the awaiting welcoming committee of the Diocese before I took the elevator up to my room and crashed out cold on the bed—doing the one thing I later found out a person who has stayed up all night should never do—and then scrambling to catch-up with where all the other pilgrims from the Diocese were having dinner. As nice as it may be, never—and I mean NEVER—leave your phone on silent (or off) when people are trying to contact you with their plans, especially if they involve food.

AND after all that happened in Lisbon—and maybe in spite of it—I still find that I want to go through it all over again.
I must be mad.

Of course, I think we (pilgrims) might already be mad for doing it in the first place, but my main motivation for embarking on such a crazed endeavour as to do it all again would be to prove that I could do it. Do it right the second time. Knowing (at least roughly) what I would be facing rather than having everything coming at me like a boxer’s fist in an arena with all of the lights turned off. To prove that I could do it without all of the angst and baggage (both metaphorical and physical) that I took with me to Lisbon. That I wouldn’t be going in blind, as the saying goes, the second time around.

You may well call foul and decry that as selfishness for whatever part of it is selfishness, but I have had the same experience of not wanting to let a “bad” experience get the better of me when I had walked the Jerusalem Bay Trail from Cowan to Brooklyn (Hawkesbury River) the first time. I walked it a second time with another group (who knew what they were doing and where they were going) and I got through it with far fewer trials and tribulations than I had the first time around.

I want to prove—if only to myself—that I can have a “good” WYD experience and not be left with thoughts such as “yes, I did it, but if I’d done this or that instead”, as I have been when going over my memories of Lisbon.

THIS whole WYD journey started with me reading a notice in a parish bulletin about a parish group’s start of their own preparations, separate from the Diocese, to go on pilgrimage to Lisbon and hearing the words “Life changing” in a small voice.

(Also, I’d had more than a fair share of accumulated pestering from well-meaning parishioners for the 12 years or so prior to Lisbon.)

There was certainly a lot of stretching and pulling with WYD Lisbon and it has certainly changed the direction of my life in different ways, but I still feel no closer to a clearer answer as to whether it was “life changing” or not. It’s always clearer to see changes from someone else’s perspective than your own, eh?

To paraphrase and expand upon what that veteran pilgrim told me on that Vigil night: you never come to World Youth Day for the actual day, that’s never the draw, you come to World Youth Day for the God-experiences, whether they be small and quiet or loud and unmistakable like a blowhorn. You don’t necessarily come for the destination, but you do come for the relationship with Him.

Pax,

Vincent Cavanagh
16 August 2024

[edited for clarity and to add missing words 16 September 2024]

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