By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Jul 24 2002 (IPS)

Absent from the religious hoopla surrounding the appearance of an aging and ill Pope John Paul II here, are some of the difficult issues facing the administrators of this ancient Christian faith, church critics say.

Visitors to the Roman Catholic Church’s week-long celebration known as World Youth Day are unlikely to hear much about priests sexually abusing young children or the church’s purge of Latin American priests and bishops who espoused liberation theology.

The option for the poor and the damage caused by opposition to safe sex and condoms in the face of the HIV/AIDS scourge in Africa are also not on the official agenda, says Joanna Manning, an ex-nun and organizer of a counter ‘Challenge the Church’ conference in Toronto.

The atmosphere at this week’s gathering of at least 200,00 young Catholics who have come to Toronto from around the world to renew their faith is decidedly upbeat.

But Manning is concerned that the Pope’s emphasis on faith and family values represents an effort to take the Catholic Church back to the time before the papacy opened up under the Vatican II reforms of the 1960s.

This involves, says Manning, a “return to the traditional patriarchal family [where] the women are to be kept out of any ministry in the church, people are not to use birth control, they have to use natural methods of birth control, and gays and lesbians are not accepted – they are tolerated but they are not accepted on equal terms”.

The Pope “thinks correctly that there is a search for spirituality in young adults,” she continues. “So he is trying to tap into that.”

“But the agenda that he is putting over, is not to expose young people to a dialogue between the church and the world. It is to set them in a church that is more like the church of the 1950s, that I grew up in,” says Manning.

Her conference will instead hear from critics of globalisation and feature a trial of the Catholic Church for its “secrecy, hypocrisy, mistaken teachings and suppression of dissent.”

Registration is down to about 200,000 for this year’s World Youth Day, compared to initial projections of upwards of a million people.

Father Brian Hogan, a Basilian priest and professor at the University of Toronto, blames the sex abuse scandals for turning off some potential participants.

Another factor is the tougher approach of Canadian immigration officials, who are concerned that some people are using the event to make a refugee claim in this country.

Local newspapers have reported that young people from Africa, Asia and Latin America seeking to attend festivities in Toronto have been denied visas to enter Canada because they lack a bank account.

“It is a grotesque way of preventing people first of all who might have a refugee claim from getting to Canada in a legal way. But it also casts a very broad net on people who in truth could simply be visitors who are excluded because they don’t have money,” says Toronto immigration lawyer Geraldine Sadoway.

“If people manage to get onto our soil, they have a right (under Canadian law) to claim protection. And if they can do that by using something like a religious event, like the World Youth Day, then that is perfectly acceptable in international human rights law,” she adds.

Local participation is also weak, according to reports. As few as 17,000 young people out of a population of 1.5-million Catholics in Toronto will attend, say newspapers.

More young Catholics are coming from Italy where there are active right-wing youth movements, including one connected to the Opus Dei that started under Franco’s fascist Spain, says Manning.

The Toronto politician responsible for ensuring that World Youth Day goes without a hitch has denied accusations by anti-poverty activists that officials plan to sweep homeless people off the city streets while the Pope is in town.

Joe Mihevc’s reassurance comes after the mayor told reporters that he would keep the homeless out of sight if he had the legal powers.

Mihevc, also a teacher of liberation theology at the University of Toronto and a self-described “Catholic progressive”, has been criticized for his involvement with the conservative-leaning World Youth Day.

He says that as a theologian he agrees with Manning that the Catholic Church “needs to change in a lot of directions”, but as a city politician he sees the financial value of hosting World Youth Day and its hundreds of thousands of pilgrims.

World Youth Day is not much different from other high profile events like Wrestlemania, which are encouraged to come to Toronto, adds Mihevc. “Would I go to Wrestlemania? Never in a million years. But “it is good for the city”.

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