Legal manoeuvre causes strife for pope's World Youth Day visit

LETTER FROM SYDNEY: PREPARATIONS FOR next week’s World Youth Day celebrations in Sydney are proving chaotic in advance of Pope Benedict XVI’s arrival.

Road closures, a threatened train strike and a large shortfall in promised visitor numbers might be more tolerable if World Youth Day was really only a day, but it goes from Tuesday to Sunday.

Most controversial of all is a temporary law brought in by the New South Wales state government which allows for fines of up to $5,500 (€3,335) for anyone causing “annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event”.

Though this clause has been used previously in 15 other acts and regulations in New South Wales, the powers were mostly limited to single venues such as Sydney Football Stadium and did not have the scope of the World Youth Day regulations, which cover more than 600 sites including parks, roads, train stations and schools.

The clause is widely seen as a sweeping new police power to protect World Youth Day participants from protesters such as the NoToPope Coalition.

Drawing members from Sydney’s atheist, gay and environmental communities, the NoToPope Coalition intends to hand out condoms.

“We will . . . hand out condoms to the pilgrims, the Catholic youth, and say to them, ‘take up the campaign within the Catholic Church . . . to promote condoms’,” said NoToPope spokeswoman Rachel Evans.

T-shirt manufacturers in Sydney are doing a brisk trade in apparel likely to cause offence to at least some participants. A shirt saying “The Pope touched me down under” is one of the milder slogans in circulation.

The church has been at pains to distance itself from the regulations. The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald to say that “neither I nor any member of the World Youth Day church leadership requested regulations to prevent protests . . . I endorse the right to peaceful protest.”

Fr Frank Brennan, who is a lawyer as well as a priest, condemned the powers as contrary to Catholic teaching on human rights. He said Pacem In Terris, Pope John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical on human rights, said the responsibility of all authorities was “to safeguard the inviolable rights of the human person”.

“I am saddened that the state has seen fit to curtail civil liberties further in this instance than they have for other significant international events hosted in Sydney,” he said.

Fr Peter Confeggi, a parish priest at Mount Druitt, one of Sydney’s poorest suburbs, is more concerned with the money being spent on World Youth Day, which some estimate will cost the church $150 million and New South Wales taxpayers another $86 million.

Fr Confeggi said the money could be better used to help homeless people or to educate the disadvantaged.

“To keep the church doors open here in Mount Druitt we scratch week after week after week,” he said.“The bottom line is this is a gross embarrassment to the church that I serve.” Fr Confeggi also believes the spirituality that will be taught during the event will be a right-wing form of Catholicism. He expressed “a great dissatisfaction with the Restorationist spirituality, which is also devoid of any commitment to social justice”.

The numbers predicted for the evening vigil Mass on July 19th at Sydney’s Randwick race course vary from 180,000 to 500,000. Whatever the eventual figure, the number of visitors from overseas will be way down on original expectations.

A combination of the strength of the Australian dollar and the country’s sheer distance from the US and Europe is helping to keep the numbers down. About 700 young Irish people are expected to make it to Sydney, down from the 1,500 Irish who attended the last World Youth Day in Cologne three years ago.

Of greater concern is the drop in numbers travelling from the US. So much so that the Australian Hotels Association (AHA) says hotels across the city will lose money.

“The numbers that were predicted to fill our hotel rooms have simply not materialised,” said AHA chief executive Sally Fielke.

Catholicism is Australia’s single biggest religion, making up 26 per cent of the population, but this rises to 28.2 per cent of New South Wales’s six million residents. With significant numbers of local Catholics and an estimated 60,000 travelling from other Australian states joining the international visitors, Pope Benedict will still see hundreds of thousands from the popemobile next week. How many of them will be “annoyed or inconvenienced” by protesters remains to be seen.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times