World Youth Day
Toronto, 2002
 

    The world has seen 82-year-old John Paul II in Toronto this week as the charismatic evangelist, his sparkle unfaded. It has seen the electricity that still flows between him and young people, the mystic holy man, the poster Pope for seniors, the moral beacon, the inflexible schoolmaster of theological orthodoxy.

    John Paul has dramatically redefined the papacy, transforming it from a Vatican CEO's job to a global office of moral teaching and personal evangelism.

    He has been called a great communicator, and unquestionably he is a spectacular showman. Nigeria's Cardinal Francis Arinze puts it this way: "People may not do what he says, but at least they have heard the Word."

    Maybe, with this Pope, history will set down a memory of a different sort: the unprecedented global manifestation of a spiritual man who sought union with God through prayer and meditation throughout his life, who celebrated the spirit in an age where the mystery of life was debased -- and who was able to make a noisy world, drenched in secular ideology and materialism, take notice

By MICHAEL VALPY, The Globe and Mail
Saturday, July 27, 200
 

Toronto Youth Day Schedule  Two Photo Galleries
http://www.globeandmail.com/special/wyd/stories/focus06.html