In Australia, there’s a massive conservative Catholic frenzy going on over something called “World Youth Day.” Given New Zealand’s weak conservative Catholic influences, there hasn’t been as much hype here.

World Youth Day was the creation of the late Pope John Paul II, and started in 1984. According to Wikipedia, the get-togethers have a fairly elastic definition of ‘youth’, involving younger conservative Catholics, parents, grandparents and priests, who talk to each other about Catholicism and doctrinal expectations of what it takes to be a “good” conservative Catholic, presumably not having sex, not using contraception if one does have sex, not having an abortion if one does have straight sex, being celibate if one suspects one is gay, or else feeling guilty about it.  Oh yes, and given that there are declining numbers of priests and nuns, please join the clergy if you have the slightest inkling that you might have a particular vocation.

In the Sydney Star Observer, meanwhile, Andrew Potts has been doing his sums, and discovered that all is not well with the faithful. Unfortunately, there’s an almighty (…) demographic blip when it comes to Australian Catholicism, largely due to the machinations of the benighted Catholic Right National Civic Council, which was largely responsible for keeping the ALP out of federal and state government for two decades due to hardline anti-communism.

Anyway, WYD’s organisers oversold the get-together massively, and there are only about 120,000  international faithful wending their way toward Sydney’s Randwick, along with “100, 000″ young Australian Catholics, despite Australian state and federal government contributions of about $A 100 million. It would seem that it may be an even larger flop than the previous such event, one of the early WYDs in Denver that only attracted half a million. Not unnaturally, there’s some grumbling going on from Sydney’s LGBT communities over the WYD hype, over-subsidisation and comparative drawing power of the LGBT Mardi Gras

Andrew Potts: “A Bigger Flop Than A Wet Mardis Gras” Sydney Star Observer: 15.05.08: http://www.ssonet.com.au