The embrace between the Pope “tired and burdened by age”, but still young at heart, and the thousands of youngsters who came to Toronto for the 17th World Youth Day has succeeded once again in astonishing the media, repudiating all those who predicted that the WYD would be a flop. “Almost a million people participated in the closing events of the WYD in Toronto”, is the headline carried by Le Monde of 30/7. “At Toronto writes Henri Tincq the Pope therefore won his gamble. Also thanks to a healthy dose of intermitting public presence with periods of rest, he physically ‘held up’. He re-found a strong voice and his talents as an actor, who knows how to leave bursts of applause to spontaneously grow, who improvises, who sometimes forces his voice… The alchemy was once again produced between this 82-year-old man, who has remained all his life the actor and the chaplain he once was in his native Poland, and the crowds of young people who say they can identify with his wisdom and his ‘exertion”. He has never focused so much on the essential, as if he felt the pressure of time, as if he were pressing the young to take over from the ‘elderly Pope’, urging them to make radical choices of life”. “Tremendous WYD!“, is the headline in the Catholic daily la Croix of 29/7: “Rarely have the WYDs comments Michel Kubler been lived so intensely as that of Toronto. There were profound exchanges between the hundreds of thousands of young people present (…). Contrary to his habit, the Pope did not convene himself the next WYD in 2005: It’s Christ, he told the young, who would be waiting for them in Cologne. One way of not prejudging his personal future, of course. But also the wisdom of the venerable old man who now prefers to stand in the wings and merely recalls the essential: follow Jesus”. “The Pope travels in spite of his fragility”, says the Herald Tribune (29/7). “For many Catholics writes Frank Bruni the key question is whether the 82-year-old pope will remain in sufficiently good health to cope with the challenges he faces, including the irruption of news about the sexual abuses of children by priests which have shocked the faithful in various countries”. The German press too has focused on the Pope’s journey to the American continent. “ To the last breath” is the headline of Die Welt of 27/7: “ The suffering Pope fills the young with enthusiasm“, writes Herbert Kremp. “ Hundreds of thousands of youth from countries throughout the world listen, in rapt silence, to the millennia-old words of the Pope. The old man murmured the message of Christ and the teenagers and twenty-year-olds wept, laughed, danced. John Paul II symbolizes suffering and its overcoming, hope in a contested world, the way of overcoming the fear that springs from limitations“. The Frankfurter Rundschau of 29/7 comments: “ In the political Pope the young see a bulwark against neoliberalism, the shift to the right and resignation: that’s why they went full of hope to the WYD in Toronto“. The Süddeutsche Zeitung of 30/7 dedicates an article to the Pope’s declaration on paedophile priests, which it commends for its clarity: “ The Pope’s statement ought to encourage also the German bishops to devote themselves to issuing clear and coherent rules in cases of sexual abuse against children and adolescents”. But in the view of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, what was lacking were “ apologies to the victims […] For these sins too a recognition of guilt by the Church would be needed. An example comes from Germany: Franz Bode, bishop in charge of youth apostolate, already made such recognition during the Holy Year“. The weekly Der Spiegel of 29/7 dedicates an article by Ralf Hoppe to the children born as a result of artificial insemination: “ The first generation of children artificially conceived has become adult and has begun searching for their own father and his identity. The children of the test tube are the precursors of the age of clones“. The article describes the life of some test-tube children, such as the American Rebecca Thompson who, on growing up, tried to discover her origins, but met with the resistance of her natural father: “For Rebecca […] observes the magazine her real father was a dream of her childhood. And the fact that she will probably not be able to meet him, even if she has found him or believes she has found him forms part of the tragedy of her life“.
