On a long, sun-drenched curve of sand better known for tanned beauties in string bikinis, as many as a million people — most of them young — gathered yesterday to welcome Pope Francis to Brazil.
Think about that for a moment. A million people. That’s many times what Barack Obama drew in Berlin as a candidate for president, a spectacle that led a swooning press corps to herald him as a “rock star” and a figure who embodied the dreams of a rising new generation.
So what is it that has drawn even more of the world’s young to Rio this week? Surely some of the attraction is that Pope Francis is the first Latin American pope, on a visit to his home continent in a nation that has the world’s largest Catholic population. And some of the pull too must be the new pope’s refreshing modesty and simplicity of life.
Only one problem here: The emphasis on Pope Francis’s undeniable personal appeal doesn’t explain the huge crowds of young people that also turned out for each of his two immediate predecessors.
At the last World Youth Day, nearly 1 1/2 million teens and young adults turned out in Madrid for Mass with Pope Benedict XVI. In far-flung Sydney a few years earlier, the same pope drew 400,000. In the Philippines in 1995, as many as 4 million — the largest gathering in history — turned up to see Pope John Paul II.
You might think these recurring crowds would occasion some rethinking of the dominant orthodoxy that we read most everywhere these days: The church is irrelevant, in decline, discredited by its sex scandals, and so on. How is it that such an institution, with such a pre-modern view of life — e.g., that human sexuality finds its fulfillment in a permanent, loving commitment between a man and a woman — could ever have a chance with the raging hormone set?
Then again, maybe the anything-goes culture that so many of our young people are growing up in hasn’t been as uniformly delightful as we’ve been led to believe. Perhaps some have tasted the loneliness and emptiness Pope Francis spoke of in Brazil.
Some may have even found hope — and a glimmer of meaning — in the heart of the pope’s message.
As he put it so simply upon his arrival in Brazil: “I have neither silver nor gold, but I bring with me the most precious thing given to me: Jesus Christ!”
Maybe too Francis has a richer idea of simplicity than a press corps whose attention is always on the singer and almost never on the song. How many times must we read about the red papal Pradas the pope has forsaken, or the Ford Focus he has embraced?
If Pope Francis has done these things, manifestly it is not to draw a contrast with his predecessor, as so many of the pundits delight in reporting, but to do in his fashion what Pope Benedict did in his: to try to clear the path to Christ.
In a world where the only power left to the church is her ability to persuade, Pope Francis understands that the little things can get in the way. So it might help, as he suggested, if the priests and bishops charged with bringing Christ to their flocks were a little more conscious of the message they send when they are seen tooling around in a car more luxurious than the cars driven by those they serve.
But even here the issue isn’t the car but Christ.
The young people who gathered on the Copacabana for Mass yesterday understand this. They may be unable to explain the theological details, but they plainly thirst for authenticity and truth, of the kind that sustains those who have nothing and can fulfill those who can find themselves bored and self-destructive because they have too much.
In the pope they catch a glimmer of the transcendent, a living witness of Christ’s promise to remain with us always.
In that sense, what we’re seeing in Brazil this week is an old story newly told. But one that, for all the cameras and reporters, the press has yet to report.
William McGurn is The Post’s editorial-page editor.