Mario Vargas Llosa, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature,
recently wrote that the success of World Youth Day in Madrid has shown
that the West needs Catholicism in order to survive.
Vargas Llosa, an agnostic known for criticizing the Church's
teachings, praised the recent event in an Aug. 28 article in the Spanish
daily El Pais.
According to Vargas Llosa, who was born in Peru but is now a Spanish
citizen, World Youth Day was “a gigantic festival of teens, students and
young professionals who came from every corner of the world to sing,
dance, pray and proclaim their adherence to the Catholic Church and
their ‘addiction’ to the Pope.”
“The small protests by secularists, anarchists, atheists and
Catholics who dissent from the Pope caused some minor incidents, albeit
some grotesque, such as the group of lunatics who were seen throwing
condoms at a group of girls who … prayed the rosary with their eyes
closed,” he recalled.
Vargas Llosa said there were “two possible readings of this event:”
one which sees World Youth Day “as more a superficial than a religious
festival” and the other which interprets it as “proof that the Church of
Christ maintains its strength and vitality.”
After noting that statistics show only 51 percent of Spanish young
people say they are Catholic, but only 12 percent practice their
religion, Vargas Llosa said the gradual decline in the number of
Catholics is not so much a symptom of the Church’s “inevitable ruin and
extinction” as it is a sign of the vitality and energy that remains
present the Church, especially under the pontificates of John Paul II
and Benedict XVI.
“In any case, setting aside the theological context and looking at
things solely from a social and political point of view, the truth is
that although it may be losing numbers and shrinking, Catholicism today
is more united, active and assertive now than in the years in which it
seemed to be on the verge of becoming unhinged and splitting apart over
internal ideological struggles,” he continued.
Vargas Llosa went on to say the question is whether this is good or
bad for the West. “As long as the State remains secular and independent
of all Churches,” he said, “it is good, because a democratic society
cannot effectively combat its enemies—beginning with corruption—if its
institutions are not firmly supported by ethical values, if a rich
spiritual life does not flourish in its bosom as a permanent antidote to
destructive forces.”
“In our times,” Vargas Llosa said, the culture “has not been able to
replace religion nor will it be able to do so, except for small
minorities on the fringes of the public at large.”
This is because
“despite how many amazingly brilliant intellectuals try to convince us
that atheism is the only logical and rational consequence of the
knowledge and experience accumulated throughout the history of
civilization, the idea of definitive extinction will continue to be
intolerable to the average human being, who will continue to find in the
faith the hope for a life beyond death, which he has never been able to
renounce.”
“Believers and non-believers should rejoice at what has taken place
in Madrid in these days in which God seemed to exist, Catholicism seemed
to be the only true religion, and all of us like good young people
walked towards the kingdom of heaven led by the hand of the Holy
Father,” he concluded.