Meeting Point in the Yellow Sector

Three hundred and fifty Italian high school and college graduates met with their American friends at World Youth Day. A pilgrimage to ask Our Lady for help in the choices they have to make. Meetings, moments of fun, relaxation, and reflection. Sharing the same passion for Christ

by MARCO BARDAZZI

«But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” The voices are not precisely like Bono’s, but the effect is not bad just the same, thanks to good guitar work and the desire to sing together, in the middle of this enormous field and the 600,000 young faces awaiting the Pope. Who knows if Bono ever found what he was looking for, since he wrote this song sixteen years ago? Maybe he should come here and look at the yellow T-shirts worn by these kids imitating him. On each of the shirts is written: “What you are looking for… exists.”

“You want to be happy”
This is the official uniform of the first national vacation of GS in the United States, which began in the woods of upstate New York and ended in Toronto, at World Youth Day, in a field full of dirt clods and frogs, shared for a weekend with more than 350 CL youths. They came primarily from Italy, but also from Kazakhstan, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Austria, Switzerland, and Egypt, to witness to the same incredible discovery: what you are looking for exists, and is visible here to an extreme, in the Yellow Sector, area 142 of Downsview Park, a former airport on the outskirts of this Ontario metropolis that for two days and a night became the tenth city in Canada in terms of population. It was a city of pilgrims, who exerted their imagination in building temporary shelters out of oilcloth and cardboard and braved the Canadian summer storms, just to be able to see from a distance and listen to the voice of an elderly Pope made younger by their presence. Who but he is capable of looking at thousands of young people and capturing immediately, with one phrase, the desire of each of their hearts? “I have listened to your festive voices,” John Paul II said to the youth in Toronto, “to your shouts and your songs, and I have sensed the profound expectation throbbing in your hearts: you want to be happy!”

What you are looking for exists. All you had to do was look around area 142, a tiny patch in the midst of the three acres of the Downsview plain, dominated by the banners of Comunione e Liberazione and Communion and Liberation USA. It was a micro-village speaking Italian and English, with a way of being together that aroused the curiosity of the Mexican “neighbors” staring at these hundreds of Italians and Americans who had just met and yet seemed to have been friends forever. Claudio, from Florence, had silently fought the Mexicans for hours, using intimidating looks and pickets as his weapons, to save the piece of ground where the American friends still to arrive would set up camp.

Watching Clint Eastwood…
And now that the colonization was complete, now that Chris, Doni, Elvira, Dino, Fr Rich, and the kids from the States were all there, the voices of this CL village in the midst of all the “Pope’s Kids” from around the world spoke of the days spent together before they got to Toronto, of the new savor of a friendship that “makes you feel like when you were a child and had a place all your own, a kingdom where you felt happy.” This is how Brian put it, a 16-year-old from Brooklyn who still smiles when he thinks about how he ended up in the midst of this strange companionship, with his “cool” looks, his wild blond hair and pierced nose. “It was Theresa, my girlfriend, who did it,” he says. “She invited me one evening to watch a movie with some friends, a western. I hate westerns, but I said I would go. It was Unforgiven, with Clint Eastwood. You may not believe it, but the way I heard that movie presented and introduced left me thunderstruck.” One can encounter Christ like this, too, through old man Clint dressed up as a cowboy, and end up meeting with friends to sleep in a sleeping bag in a Canadian field, waiting for John Paul II. “These days have been fantastic,” Brian said, “especially the field trip to Niagara Falls. A friendship like this is completely different from the ones I have in Brooklyn. Here, every time is a new discovery, it is an emotional roller coaster. I feel understood, I manage to open up…”

He would have liked to “open up” and say more, but Chris grabbed his guitar, rounded up a chorus, and sang at the top of his voice to the entire field of Downsview Park just who Brian is–they had written a song just for him, and good-natured Brian put up with it smilingly.

In the Movement’s experience in America, perhaps even more than in other parts of the world, music has played a crucial role. This is a friendship that grows to the accompaniment of an uninterrupted sound track. “Especially the music struck me in these days,” agreed Kathleen, a 17-year-old from Washington, DC, “above all because of the explanations that were given of the songs we listened to or sang. Fr Rich talked to us about the lyrics for the songs he wrote, saying they were not his own work: ‘They come from an Other.’ This is what I have understood the whole time I have been here. Nobody has ever talked to me like that. Here, there is Something Else.” This is more or less the same impression that Jim, 16, meant to take home to Crosby, in the heart of Minnesota, from where he came with his friends McLean and John: “It’s incredible to go on a vacation with your friends and listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony together. It’s something I’ll never forget. I have been to other religious gatherings, to various retreats, but the people in those places always seemed to be acting. Here, in these days, instead, I have been with people who are not acting. What we are doing together is their real life.”

A digital presentation
There was a common voice, with different accents, of kids from the East Coast of the United States, the Midwest, and the West Coast, too, who did not know each other until four days before. At the beginning of the vacation, a digital presentation was organized using Power Point slides to let everybody introduce themselves: on a huge screen, a map of the United States appeared, with the various states being colored to show which ones were represented and by whom. “A kind of friendship like this is certainly not what we live every day,” said Amanda, 17, and Nadia, 13, who had come from Sacramento, California. “There are people we met for the first time last Monday and whom we can now call our best friends.”

Looking at the Pope and listening to his call, immersed in a reality like this, makes us understand better what John Paul II meant when he explained to the young people that “the key word of Jesus’ teaching is a proclamation of joy: ‘Blessed…’”

“I don’t think the Pope’s visit would have had the personal impact it had on me,” says Dino, a French teacher from Staten Island who accompanied the GS kids to Toronto, “and I don’t think that the sacrifice and discomfort of standing in the rain would have had this impact, if it had not been clear to me that, through our charism, Jesus is a human face.”

From the Land to the Peoples
In the nearby Italian sector, the language was different but the atmosphere was the same. The big group coming from Italy, escorted by Fr Beppe Bolis, was made up largely of recent high school and college graduates, to whom the pilgrimage had been proposed as an occasion to ask Our Lady for a personal and more profound experience of relationship with Christ, in view of the choices they would soon make concerning their studies, work, vocations. For a few days before the weekend with the Pope, home for them was Fleming Academy in Toronto, a school right in the middle of the Orthodox Jewish quarter of the city. Waiting to give them a warm welcome were the friends of the Canadian communities who, together with the Italians, had prepared and offered to thousands of young people the exhibition “From the Land to the Peoples,” an exhibit that chronicles, through authentic artifacts, the history of the early Christian communities. The panels, installed in one of the pavilions of the exhibition area where the participants in World Youth Day spent a large part of their days before going on to Downsview, were the goal of a constant pilgrimage and a great occasion for encounter.

Experience of Mercy
In the souvenir albums of those who crossed the ocean in response to the Pope’s invitation are numerous photographs, many of them unusual. There is the attack on the roast suckling pig that Paolo and the Toronto community had calculated would be enough for twice the number of people there and instead was devoured to the bones (and even further…). There is the morning of catechesis in a school in the city, with the Patriarch of Venice Msgr Angelo Scola, under the banner of the invitation to “let yourself be reconciled with God.” There is the muggy evening spent sitting on the pavement of a parking lot on the outskirts of Toronto, filling the air with songs from Brianza and Florentine stornelli–a bizarre repertory that some Canadian passers-by stopped to listen to out of curiosity–accompanied by bits from The Blues Brothers and a rapid-fire series of skits. “The encounter we are having,” Fr Beppe reminded everyone in the parking lot, “is the experience of Mercy, which is a reality greater than we are. For us, it is not a feeling or a word, it is a Presence within our lives. Everything is gambled in standing in front of the You of Christ.” This was a reminder that gave meaning to the exertion in store for the next morning, the long trip to Downsview Park, the evening vigil, the discomfort of a night sleeping outside. “We are not wayfarers,” Fr Beppe emphasized, “but pilgrims. Let us act so that everything, even physical toil, may be offered to Christ.”

Fr James
For the Italians, the encounter with the Pope was the turning point in an experience that then continued for another week in New York. Here too, celebrating Mass in St Patrick’s Cathedral with the Auxiliary Bishop of Rio de Janeiro, Msgr Filippo Santoro, or retracing the steps of last Easter’s Way of the Cross from the Brooklyn Bridge to Ground Zero, there was no lack of occasions for wonder. One could not help being struck, for example, by a person like Fr James, a priest on Staten Island who offered his church to the pilgrims coming from Toronto. Tired from their long journey, wanting a shower or to collapse into a sleeping bag, the kids found the strength, who knows where, to put together an evening of singing, at the end of which Fr James surprised them by saying, as he wished them a good night, “I have never seen kids sing and pray like this.” At the end of the week, after having been a constant companion during their days in New York, Fr James said goodbye with extraordinarily affectionate words: “I will pray for you every day,” he said, “and for the Movement of CL, that each one of you may be happy just as you have made my life happy in these days by giving new life to my priesthood.”

“In my life I want everything”
These words resound in remarkable harmony with those that Elena sent to Lorna in Brooklyn immediately upon her return to Turin: “In these days, I understood the value of the grace I have received by encountering the Movement. Now I am in the reality that has been given me with one immense desire: never to lose the companionship I experienced in Toronto and New York. In my friends’ faces I saw the Mystery’s face, and I want to go on seeing it! In these days, I tried to follow and to gamble my freedom, and I gained a hundred times as much. I would like to be as happy as I am now forever. This is why I don’t want to lose the Movement for any reason in the world. In my life, I want everything, the everything that is Christ, who is behind and inside our companionship, in whatever gestures we make.”