As a confirmed atheist, I try not to cause needless offence to people of a religious persuasion. Each to his own is my motto, as long as they don’t try and impose their values and belief systems on others.
The Roman Catholic Church would, however, try the patience of, well, a saint. Recently we’ve had reported two cases of corpse-worship and now we’re getting more information about the medieval jiggery-pokery that is going to feature at the forthcoming, mendaciously-labelled World Yoof Day.
SACRED Catholic rituals will come to Sydney’s streets when temporary confessional booths are set up in Darling Harbour, Hyde Park, the Opera House and Randwick Racecourse for World Youth Day pilgrims.
The act of confession would be made available to thousands of pilgrims at two sites at the Sydney Convention Centre and Hyde Park at scheduled times and in multiple languages, said the World Youth Day director of liturgy, Peter Williams.
Confessions will also be heard at the sites of the stations of the cross, including the Domain, the Opera House and Darling Park.
Booths will have a partition between priest and the confessor and heavy curtains for privacy. At other World Youth Day events, confession has often been informal, with the priest hearing them on an outdoor chair.
See? Our World Yoof Day confessionals will be soooo much nicer than those other cities’.
And of course no Catholic get-together is complete without that holiest of rituals where they convince themselves they are eating bits of a dead Jew:
Father Williams said: “As I see it, Mass was not designed to be celebrated with 500,000 people. There are challenges, but they are not insurmountable.”
Not included in the online story, but mentioned in the hard copy version, is the fact that the communicants will have to get by on this occasion without a swig of the Saviour’s blood. That seems a bit rough. Can’t the AHA organise a truckload of donations? Must be some goonie somewhere past its use by date.
I guess if people are determined to act like superstitious peasants from the Dark Ages they should be allowed to but it pisses me off that the rest of us are forking out tens of millions of dollars to subsidise them. Not only that but the entire apparatus of the NSW government seems to be enthusiastically cheering the affair on; up near the Queensland border a huge RTA sign has stopped telling us to slow down and now tells us with breathless excitement how many days left to Yoof Day. What happened to the separation of church and state?
However I guess it will all be worthwhile if, on the final day, the pope declares in charmingly broken English that it’s been ‘the best World Yoof Day ever’. Australians just love hosting global events presided over by authoritarian geriatric Europeans.
