Speaks at Young People’s Festival in Spain : Pope Urges Youth to ‘Shake Up’ World

Nearly everybody had a sleeping bag and one jaunty group of Scots brought a disc jockey and an official bingo caller, but when Pope John Paul II sternly joined a gigantic fiesta-on-a-mountain here Saturday, the tone was more scout jamboree than Woodstock.

High spirited and obviously having a good time, the 69-year-old Pope nevertheless brought a message of uncompromising morality with him to a church-sponsored World Youth Day shrine to the apostle St. James.

On the flight en route to Spain from Rome on Saturday morning, the Pope told reporters that he is pleased by events in his native Poland--”very important”--but warned that consolidation of a non-Communist government there “is not easy.” He again deplored violence in Lebanon and said without further elaboration that there had been “a certain interest” in his offer last week to go there in search of peace.

Scoring materialism, sexual permissiveness, drug addiction and pollution in a major address Saturday night, John Paul urged tens of thousands of militant young pilgrims “to shake up the torpor of our world” with unrelenting discipline and unflagging obedience to church teaching.

“We want to light a bonfire of love and of truth that captures the attention of our world,” the Pope told the youths, many of them members of conservative Roman Catholic movements.

Magnet for Pilgrims

By the Vatican’s estimate, more than 300,000 young people jammed a natural amphitheater Saturday night to hear a papal ceremony from a mount called Gozogozo on the outskirts of this town in northwestern Spain that has been a magnet for Catholic pilgrims for 1,100 years. Although there is no historical proof, the martyred St. James’ tomb is popularly believed to lie under Santiago’s fairy-tale Gothic cathedral.

By tradition, pilgrims walk the arduous and historically dangerous route across Spain to the church, but most of Saturday’s faithful came by bus. There was select delegations from the Americas, but mostly it was a European festival. Among 8,200 pilgrims in one campground stocked with Spanish army tents and field rations, there were 39 campers from the United States.

On his 43rd foreign trip, the Pope sounded a call for “a world without frontiers.”

Recalling Santiago’s pilgrim history, John Paul told a welcoming Spanish King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia at Santiago airport that “early Europe found one of the powerful factors for cohesiveness: a Christian faith . . . which became one of the Continent’s strongest and most fruitful foundations. . . . Today’s pilgrimage is not only a due homage to the past, but a demonstration of trust in its perspectives for vital renewal.”

As leader of a now determinedly secular Spain in which church influence is waning, Juan Carlos stressed by counterpoint a common political heritage as the major force in the current move towards a united Europe.

Through their Christian faith, the king said, the young pilgrims had come to proclaim their “profound conviction” of “the dignity of man, freedom, the equality and solidarity between men and nations, and a commitment to a progress that is not only technical and material, but also spiritual and ethical.”

The church mustered 160 cardinals and bishops from around the world to share a prayerful excitement climaxed by a three-act morality play Saturday night with the Pope speaking after every act.

“We have seen acted out some of the things that people think of as goals: money, success, egotism, material comfort,” he noted after the first act.