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 Ahead of World Youth Day, Steve Dow asks: ‘Will bigotry forever stalk our eternal lives?’
Roll up, roll up. Hitch your sleeping bag to your backpack on the July 19-20 weekend, claim your patch of Randwick Racecourse or Centennial Park, and see Pope Benedict XVI pontificate.
Cut to the 81-year-old Pope waving his arms in the air like a raver. Queue graphic, ‘The time of your eternal life’. All we need now is for the Pontiff to do a little air guitar on his special Sydney Harbour cruise ship trip, and he’ll become the Pied Piper calling the overflow of young Pentacostalists spilling out of Hillsong.
Don’t you just want to shake your booty to those hip 23rd World Youth Day TV ads? Actually, the title is a misnomer, given Youth Day will drag on for several days in Sydney. Unlike the Mardi Gras parade, Youth Day doesn’t quite know how to give the punters a quick show and leave ’em screaming for more.
As a teenager himself, Benedict, aka Joseph Alois Ratzinger, was compulsorily enrolled in the Hitler Youth. In his dotage, the oldest ever elected Pope plumps for official church oppression, forbidding birth control, abortion and homosexuality.
Will bigotry forever stalk our eternal lives? I recently went for day surgery at Sydney’s major Catholic teaching hospital, St Vincent’s (kidney stone, kids; do keep your fluids up). As an emergency contact I had written my boyfriend’s name, and listed his relationship as ‘partner’.
The typed admission form was returned to me for checking. ‘Partner’ had been changed to ‘other’. Later, in recovery, the male nurse minced up and offered to call my ‘friend’.
A month later, a second day surgery at the secular Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick, and a different approach to diversity. A fellow patient, a transgender person, Alannah, was pacing around in a frock, pearls and clutching a battered pink handbag. A well-meaning Aboriginal patient called her ‘brother’, to which Alannah replied, sotto voce: “I am not your brother, I am a lady!” The nurses respectfully referred to Alannah as “she”.
Back in church, the flock shrinks: 5.1 million Australians call themselves Catholics, but in 2006 only 13.8 per cent attended Mass on a typical Sunday, down from 15.3 per cent in 2001.
None of which will stop the Iemma Government forking out a reported $106 million on the week-long World Youth Day. I phoned World Youth Day coordinator Bishop Anthony Fisher and queried the largesse on taxpayers’ behalf. “This is going to bring in big numbers of tourists, and showcase Sydney to the world,” he reasoned.
One could make the same argument for Mardi Gras, and wouldn’t $106 million be just lovely there too? Morris Iemma promised Clover Moore back in March he would talk to the Major Events Board about funding our 30-year-old event.
The recent resignation of failed Tourism NSW boss John O’Neill would seem an ideal time for a little more youthful vigour and some serious investment in home-grown Sydney spectacles with a proven track record. Hands in the air for that one.
Steve Dow is a Sydney journalist. Visit stevedow.com.au.
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