The Conversation: We Formed a Beautiful Community

By Thomas Rosica

July 1, 2012

Ten years ago, in July 2002, World Youth Day national director Father Tom Rosica and his young staff welcomed the world to Toronto. The guest of honour was no less than Pope John Paul II, who presided over what would be the last World Youth Day of his lifetime. For six days, an estimated 850,000 young Christians from all over the globe sang, prayed and celebrated their faith in public.

I was minding my business as chaplain of the University of Toronto, head of the Newman Centre, teaching scripture, and in December of 1998 it was recommended to me by a group of bishops to let my name stand as one of the candidates for World Youth Day Ftr: Some of my senior people on staff who had been with me at the Newman Centre, who then joined our World Youth Day staff, went on to do lay missionary work for two or three years I wasn't going to tell him, but the secretary said, "Tell the Holy Father!" So I told him, "Well, in fact, these people want me to start a Catholic television network in Canada C: You also said at that time, "We're just beginning to scratch the surface of our Youth Ministry At one point, when the Mayor was watching the scene of the Pope coming down the Via Conciliazione with 500,000-plus people present, Mel said, "Tom, we've got to build something like this! How can we do this in Toronto?" I said, "Mel, we don't have to do this And it was in the months right afterwards, in November, right after World Youth Day, I was called to a meeting by the Gagliano family in Toronto and I thought it was for an unpaid bill or something So I'm looking at him and I said, "What's this got to do with me?" And he said, 'We saw what you did on television with the World Youth Day and we saw you speak, and we want you to take this and run with it But what we need is a constant follow-up on the part of the bishops, on the national level, on the regional level, to draw forth, to call forth, young people, to make sure that the priorities are given to the youth ministry From January 2000 onward, I started going to meetings in Rome because they were in the throes of planning their big World Youth Day, the Jubilee event, and we followed that very closely from the inside Earlier that day [Friday], I took the 14 young people from around the world for lunch with the Pope at Strawberry Island C: You had a wonderful phrase at the time: World Youth Day is a time-release capsule And one of the unique things we did—and this kind of started with our World Youth Day—was to convince the team in Rome, as well as the Council for theLaity, that we have a team shadow the World Youth Day in Rome However with new Episcopal and lay pastoral leadership following World Youth Day, several Quebec dioceses have begun to build on the solid foundation that was laid for Toronto 2002 In fact, a couple of months ago, I was at a public function, and a lady asked me, "When you were a little boy did you ever dream that when you grew up you would lead a World Youth Day?" And I said, "No ma'am, that would be a " [Laughs And I'm wondering, do you think that we do have more faith in common life in Canada in the wake of World Youth Day than we had before it came to Toronto? Or have we kind of skated in the other direction and, despite it, lost some of the faith in common life that we might have had?

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