Don’t worry, he put her back afterwards! Benedict XVI at World Youth Day 2008

Earlier this week I was preparing for an exam and I just had to stop and reflect. I’ve no idea why, but I was brought back to World Youth Day (WYD) 2008 and the Pope’s message to the youth of the world. I didn't go, but I followed what was going on. He spoke about all sorts of things, from the environment:

The world is being scarred and its natural resources used up by humanity’s insatiable consumption.

Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth: erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption.

To ethics:

Relativism, by indiscriminately giving value to practically everything, has made ‘experience’ all-important. Yet experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead not to genuine freedom but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect.

A new generation of Christians is being called to help build a world in which God’s gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished — not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed.

He even apologised to those that are victims of paedophile priests:

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.

But, there’s one topic he touched upon that really goes to the core of our modern society:

In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.

We need a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deaden our souls and poison our relationships.

Do not be confounded by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty and subjective experience displaces truth.

And you know what, he’s right. In my room, I have a mobile phone (with all the latest features), an iPod (filled with songs from the iTunes store), a laptop, a nice sound system and plenty of books to name but a few things. And in the rest of the house I have a media centre PC, an LCD high definition telly, another nice sound system, another laptop, a modern car, an XBOX 360, plenty of games to go with it, a fitted kitchen… the list goes on.

I’ll stop bragging now. The point I was trying to make is that I really am quite lucky, and yet these things don’t make me truly happy. It’s my family, friends and most importantly my God that makes me happy. Sometimes, when I go to bed and I’m alone in the dark, I fell that interior emptiness and I hear that quiet sense of despair.

My qualm with atheists is not that they’re not Catholic, I’m a religious pluralist – I tend to believe that any religion based upon love can bring us to God (though Catholicism is the best, of course), it’s that atheists are in denial of a spiritual side of humanity. It’s no mistake that every human society, past and present, has had a religion – we crave spirituality! For me, this points to the existence of God, however it does not necessarily have to do so. Some people don’t believe in the existence of a deity, but meditate. The suppression of spirituality in our society is causing this spiritual vacuum, we try to fill it with consumer goods, but ultimately it’s God that makes us happy.

Labels: benedictxvi, consumerism, WYD