c. 1999 Religion News Service

ST. LOUIS _ To see 20,000 high school and college-age young people clap and scream with youthful abandon for an aged, bent figure whose slurred speech they must strain to understand is certainly unusual. For them to do so after he has lectured them about putting limits on personal freedoms that many Americans consider their God-given birthright is even more extraordinary.

But that’s just what happened here this week during the 31-hour visit of Pope John Paul II. At age 78 and in failing health, history’s most-traveled pope remains a powerful moral force and remarkable symbol of hope and faith who transcends culture and generations to connect with young people in a way their parents might only envy.

The pope’s ability to be morally persuasive with political leaders was underscored by Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan’s decision Thursday (Jan. 28) to honor John Paul’s request to spare the life of a convicted three-time killer who faced a death sentence.

Carnahan’s change of heart came one day after he was personally asked to do so by the pope, with whom he briefly spoke after the Wednesday evening prayer service that was John Paul’s last St. Louis event before returning to Rome.

Carnahan, a Baptist, said he acted out of”deep and abiding respect for the pontiff and all that he represents.”Because of John Paul’s intervention, Darrell J. Mease will spend his life in prison without possibility of parole instead of dying as scheduled on Feb. 10.

However, Carnahan made it clear he still supported capital punishment. As St. Louis Archbishop Justin Regali noted, the death penalty is still law in Missouri.”This doesn’t mean the problem is solved,”Rigali said.

The state of John Paul’s influence over the moral choices of American Catholic youth is similarly unresolved.

The 20,000 young people who showed up for the all-day Christian rock-powered”Light of the World”gathering at this city’s Kiel Center were in many ways unrepresentative of America’s Catholic youth. In addition to regional differences among young Catholics, those at Kiel generally were more involved with parish youth ministries or had some other strong connection to the institutional church that gained them access to the event.

But in interviews even they expressed opinions about pre-marital sex, women’s ordination, married priests, birth control and even abortion that were at odds with the very words they heard from the pope they vocally showered with adoration.

The pope exhorted the youth _ just as he did adults every time he spoke publicly here _”to be a disciple of Christ”by rejecting all that diminishes respect for human rights. Stay away from drugs, violence and premarital sex; protect the unborn and the dying; regularly attend church and”do not be taken in by false values and deceptive slogans, especially about your freedom,”he said.

Adhering to all that is not easy, said Amy Kohl, 17.”Kids are split about what the pope says,”said the Dittmer, Mo., teen.”I would say a lot of them want to follow the teachings of the church but the contemporary times influence them so they kind of do their own thing.” A recent University of Chicago survey would seem to support Kohl’s observation.

As a group, less than 15 percent of young American Catholics say pre-marital sex is always wrong and about three-fourths say the church should ordain women and allow priests to marry _ two possibilities to which John Paul has slammed shut the door.”What we have here is a major disconnect between the way young Catholics, actually Catholics of all ages, tend to live and what they nod approvingly of or, in the case of the youth at Kiel, yell their hearts out over,”said J. Patout Burns Jr., a former priest and now professor of Christian thought at St. Louis’ Washington University.”This is not the church’s ideal of papal infallibility. It’s akin to the situation among many Protestants who regard faith and beliefs as very personal and turn out for Billy Graham because he’s also an ideal and symbol of hope.” Yes, agreed Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for Free Choice, which supports legal abortion and other reproductive rights at odds with church teaching. Young American Catholics do generally practice a”cafeteria Catholicism,”that allows them to select what they’re comfortable with from the church’s many teachings, she said.

The good news for the institutional church, she said, is that”as many don’t feel they have to leave the church to disagree as was once the case.” In the late 1960s and 1970s, Kissling said,”the church hemorrhaged members who walked away over birth control and other issues. That’s not happening now..”The question is,”will the young people who disagree but stay with the church see a need to challenge the church to change. My prediction is they will be content to let John Paul or some other pope have his position and just go about their own lives.” So, if, as George Wiegel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., says,”the love of young Catholics for the pope on display in St. Louis was far more than just celebrity worship or homage to a symbol,”what was it?

Wiegel, who is completing a biography of John Paul, said it represented a”hunger for moral integrity that’s so hard to find in the nation today.”As they mature, he said, chances are these young Catholics will stay within the institutional church”because of the seed planted within them by an extraordinary pope.” Perhaps. But don’t necessarily count on even those with established ties to the church to practice religiously what this pope has spent his 20-year pontificate preaching to all who would listen.

DEA END RIFKIN