Glastonbury with God: Pope to headline Kraków festival for 330,000 Catholics

Hundreds of thousands of young Catholic pilgrims are heading to Kraków in Poland for six days of music, prayer and spiritual masterclasses, with Pope

Jul 26, 2016

By Harriet Sherwood
Hundreds of thousands of young Catholic pilgrims are heading to Kraków in Poland for six days of music, prayer and spiritual masterclasses, with Pope Francis headlining an event labelled by some as “Glastonbury with God”.

More than 330,000 pilgrims have registered for World Youth Day, a global Catholic festival that last took place three years ago in Rio, with tens of thousands more expected to attend. Most will be Europeans but more than 180 countries will be represented at the event, which starts on Tuesday.

The young Catholics will be joined by 800 bishops, including 70 cardinals, and 20,000 priests. Their attendance figures are expected to be swell when huge numbers of Poles descend on Kraków for the papal mass on Sunday, with some anticipating a turnout of up to 2 million. More than 92% of Poland’s 38.5 million population is Catholic.

During his first trip to Poland, Pope Francis is to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death camp where more than a million people died between 1940 and 1945, and the Jasna Góra monastery in Cz?stochowa that contains the famous 14th-century icon of the Black Madonna.

At Auschwitz, the pope has cancelled a scheduled speech, saying he would prefer to mark his visit with silent prayer. “I would like to go to that place of horror without speeches, without crowds – only the few people necessary,” he told reporters last month. “Alone, enter, pray. And may the Lord give me the grace to cry.”

The pope’s visit has presented organisers and the Polish authorities with logistical and security challenges. Poland suspended its participation in the EU’s Schengen free movement agreement for the month of July, in order to reintroduce border controls for the Kraków event and for the Nato summit in Warsaw.

The Polish prime minister, Beata Szyd?o, has put security forces on the highest level of alert. Polish troops will be deployed for Pope Francis’s appearances, and 2,300 buildings have had security checks. The mayor of Kraków, Jacek Majchrowski, has said the city will be “as secure as the Vatican” during the five days of the pontiff’s visit.

Federico Lombardi, the pope’s spokesman, told reporters: “There are no particular concerns in Poland over security.”

The state rail network has said it will lay on hundreds of extra trains to move pilgrims around Poland. Seven new bridges have been built to increase access to Campus Misericordiae, or Field of Mercy, a 450-acre site nine miles (15km) east of Kraków where the pope’s main masses will be held. Able-bodied pilgrims are expected to make the journey there and back on foot. Francis will use a city tram as his popemobile during the trip.

Almost 200 schools in the city will be used to accommodate pilgrims, with tents provided for 28,000. Five hundred Catholic parishes in and around Kraków are also hosting pilgrims.

Alongside masses, the event will offer concerts, sports and arts activities, confession booths, vocational advice and masterclasses given by bishops. “People everywhere love festivals,” said Father Christopher Jamison, a Benedictine monk who is among 3,500 Britons going to Kraków. “World Youth Day is up there with the best of them. Some people describe it as Glastonbury with God.”

During the visit, Francis’s speeches and homilies will be watched closely for references to two controversial issues in Poland: refugees and abortion.

Global migration and the plight of refugees have been among the pope’s most prominent themes, with ardent appeals for compassion and generosity. But the rightwing Polish government has resisted fulfilling its EU-agreed quota of taking 7,600 refugees from Syria, saying the figure should be revised following terrorist attacks in Europe.

Some Polish priests have warned that an influx of Muslim refugees could dilute Poland’s Christian character.

On abortion, Catholic bishops in Poland are pressing for a total ban, a move that prompted women to walk out of churches across the country in protest this year.

Poland already has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. Terminations are permitted only in cases of rape, serious foetal abnormality or where the life of the mother is at risk. Doctors can refuse to carry out abortions as a matter of conscience, and an estimated 100,000 Polish women travel abroad to have abortions each year.

Both issues reflect an increasing polarisation in the country between pro-European liberals and nationalist conservatives.

The power and influence of the Polish Catholic church – which is generally more conservative than its counterparts elsewhere in Europe or the US – has become more entrenched with the victory last October of the rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS).

Some see the church and the PiS-led government almost as a partnership. “During the election campaign, PiS leaders talked about the importance of Catholicism in Polish identity. There were symbolic appearances of high-ranking members of PiS at church events. While the church remains formally apolitical, some local priests may have made veiled suggestions on how people should vote,” said Stanley Bill, a lecturer in Polish studies at Cambridge University.

According to Adam Szostkiewicz – a journalist at Polityka, a liberal weekly news magazine – “there is close cooperation between the ruling party and the Catholic church. Not everyone is happy with this. It’s clearly in contradiction to Pope Francis’s vision of the church as a spiritual hospital whose door is always open to have a politicised church aligned with a political party.”

Although attendance at mass has fallen in the past 20 to 30 years, more than a third of Poles still go to church regularly, and some churches in Warsaw broadcast through loudspeakers on Sunday mornings to those unable to squeeze inside.

“The power of the pulpit has diminished but on a much lesser scale than in other countries,” said Bill.

“There’s been a drop in attendance, but Catholic identification is still very high. Young people who are relatively liberal in their outlook may still go to church.”

The influence of Radio Maryja, an ultra-conservative Catholic station headed by a controversial priest, Tadeusz Rydzyk, is seen as significant. “It reaches poorer socio-economic groups, pensioners, housewives, people outside big cities.” said Simona Guerra, a politics lecturer and EU specialist at Leicester University. “It gives a platform to PiS ministers, and its interviews are very supportive and sympathetic.”

About 1.2 million listeners regularly tune in to broadcasts that warn against “gender ideology” and the “Islamisation of Europe”. Rydzyk extends his influence through other media outlets and his College of Social and Media Culture, based in Toru?. His foundation has received at least one grant from the government.

Rydzyk’s fundamentalist Catholicism is at odds with Pope Francis’s emphasis on inclusion and mercy. Indeed, Radio Maryja has been criticised by the Vatican for activities “damaging to the church”.

“The Polish Catholic church and Pope Francis don’t necessarily see the world in the same way,” said Guerra.

According to Bill, “Francis is not popular in the conservative sections of the church hierarchy in Poland. He is considered much too liberal. There’s a strong sense of reserve – but he is the pope, after all. There could be uncomfortable moments.”

The Vatican has said that Pope Francis will meet Polish bishops in private.--The Guardian

 

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