PERSONS in high places love an audience, particularly an adoring one, and one of the largest ever seen in this country will assemble in Sydney in July. More than 200,000 pilgrims will gather for the Catholic Church's World Youth Day at Randwick Racecourse, an event which will also mark the first visit to Australia by Pope Benedict XVI. The good and the great will trample each other underfoot in their desperation to get front-row seats when Il Papa celebrates mass and in terms of public relations coups it will be Catholics 10, Rest Nil.
All this comes at a cost and as a Catholic, albeit not an exemplary one, I wonder how in a world of poverty and want, the Church can justify the expenditure of $150 million to stage a giant get-together.
That's the figure contained in a confidential briefing prepared by the Church for priests and leaked to a Sydney newspaper last week.
This figure marks a blowout of $50 million on the original projected costs and goes nowhere near representing the true financial burden of the event.
The people of New South Wales in particular and of the wider Commonwealth in general have good reason to ponder whether they are getting worth for their taxpayer dollars, particularly those who are not of what my flagellant high school religious teachers were wont to describe as "the one true faith".
It is the NSW and Federal governments, after all, that are footing the bill for the $41 million compensation package being paid to the Australian Jockey Club and the racing industry for the disruption and revenue loss they will incur due to the use of Randwick Racecourse as the venue.
This was because of Cardinal George Pell's absolute insistence that World Youth Day be held at Randwick and the reluctance of the NSW Government to become involved in a confrontation with the leader of the Catholic Church in Australia.
It could have been held at Sydney Olympic Park but Pell, who will be centre stage when the Pope arrives, wanted Randwick no matter what compensation would ultimately have to be paid by the public for the disruption this would cause.
Nor does the figure of $150 million take into account the cost of providing sleeping quarters in public schools for the pilgrims, that of standby emergency services and the enormous cost of ensuring Pope Benedict's security with most estimates placing this at about $20 million, making for a total tab of $210 million and counting.
Invariably, governments produce statistics to show what enormous economic benefits to the community at large will be generated by the staging of events such as World Youth Day.
The Queensland Government has been doing this for years with the Gold Coast Indy race, trumpeting rubbery figures in an attempt to justify the amount of public money that is spent propping up the event.
There's nothing new in politics so not surprisingly, the NSW Government now claims that World Youth Day will deliver $150 million in economic benefits for the nation.
How did it arrive at this amount? You will never know because it has refused public access to the report which produced this magical figure.
Moving quickly, the Government used legal provisions to exempt the report from the Freedom of Information Act, claiming it would be against the public interest to disclose it.
What it meant, of course, was that it would be against the Government's interest for I would have thought it very much in the public's interest to know just what sort of a return on its investment it was getting to stage an event for a religious group which represents, according to the 2006 Census, 25.8 per cent of the population.
NSW taxpayers could be forgiven for thinking that in an attempt to justify its political expedience in caving in to Pell's demands, Premier Morris Iemma's troubled Government had merely thought of a number and doubled it.
In holding World Youth Day, the Church obviously hopes to engage with young people who show little or no interest in organised religion.
Walk into any church in Brisbane next Sunday and you will see very few people under the age of 30 in the pews. The problem is real but I very much doubt if World Youth Day is going to suddenly fill the churches with teenagers.
It might give all who attend a feeling of belonging and relevance for a few days but it is not going to reverse the decline in the Church's appeal in this country or elsewhere.
In Ireland last year, that bastion of Catholicism, 160 priests died and nine were ordained. In the same period, 228 nuns died and two took vows.
Young people, even in Ireland, are not listening and it's issues like contraception, divorce and celibacy which need to be addressed.
The money, plainly, could have been better spent.
Let the Pope visit Australia by all means but not at a cost of more than $200 million, all spent to provide a stage from which the Church's hierarchy can preach to the converted.
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