Will Religious Fervor Outlast Pope’s Visit? : Catholics: He is certain to stir youthful celebrants, but experts doubt many will be called to evangelism.

With pomp and majesty, Pope John Paul II will stand before a half million of the faithful and curious Sunday at a dramatic outdoor Mass celebrated against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains.

In flowing vestments, the successor of St. Peter will preach and exhort. He will cajole and encourage. Then he will elevate the wafer and chalice in an ancient Christian ritual commemorating the sacrifice of Jesus for the sins of the world.

This will be the grand finale of World Youth Day, a four-day Roman Catholic extravaganza of rock music, souvenir hawkers, religious instruction, African-American gospel singers and bell-ringing, incense-swinging altar boys.

It comes about as close to an old-fashioned Protestant revival as anything this Pope does.

Its aim is as old as the church and as new as a baptized infant: to “equip the saints” to carry the Gospel message of hope and redemption to their families, friends and neighbors.

But how effective are such revivals? After the Pope returns to Rome on Sunday, how long-lasting will the fervor be?

“I think this will be a genuine test of his charisma,” said Donald E. Miller, a sociologist of religion at USC.

Many observers--including Catholic scholars--doubt that World Youth Day participants over the long term will be any more or less committed to evangelizing their peers than they were before.

“I don’t think these are life-changing events for the majority of people,” said Wade Clark Roof, a professor of religion and society at UC Santa Barbara and author of a new book on baby boomers, “A Generation of Seekers.”

In making his third visit to America as Pope, John Paul is following a long, venerable--and sometimes bloody--history of Christian evangelism. From the Apostle Paul’s itinerant wanderings through the Roman world to Billy Graham’s preaching beamed by satellite to millions around the globe, ministers of the Gospel have long struck out for the hinterlands to carry their message of damnation, redemption and hope.

In Denver, John Paul is coming face to face with a largely American audience, proud of its Catholic heritage but imbued with the independent spirit shaped by American democratic tradition. Of the 165,000 World Youth Day celebrants ranging in age from 13 to 39, the vast majority--118,000--live in the United States.

If the Pope confronts his flock here on such issues as birth control or the place of women in the church, many believe that his words will fade like an echo in the Rockies.

“Somebody said they love the messenger and not the message,” said Father John Coleman, professor of religion and society at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. “That seems to be the story of the papal visits.”

Attracting large crowds is also no guarantee that the message will stick, according to social psychologists, church historians and clergy.

Graham, who in 50 years as a Protestant evangelist has preached to millions around the world, said that he believes one in four people at his crusades who make a commitment to become Christians is still faithful five to 10 years later.

Surveys by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Assn., headquartered in Minneapolis, have yielded marginally to far better results--depending on where the crusade was held and how long after the event the poll was taken.

George Whitefield--the Anglican priest turned fiery evangelist credited with launching the first Great Awakening in Colonial America--drew overflow crowds with his preaching. He was once forced to crawl through a window to preach to a packed house.

His power of persuasion was so finely honed that a skeptical Benjamin Franklin went to hear him firmly resolved not to toss a single penny in the offering plate. When Whitefield’s stemwinder concluded, Franklin admitted later, “I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”

But things settled back to business as usual after Whitefield left town. “With Whitefield gone, the fires soon died down,” authors Roger Finke and Rodney Stark report in their recent book, “The Churching of America, 1776-1990.”

There are any number of explanations why the fervor wanes after the evangelist leaves town. “Maybe the pressure and the allurements of the world or maybe materialism or whatever it may be . . . wipe all that out,” Graham said from Europe, where he is working on his memoirs.

Graham, who has met the Pope three times, said that John Paul appeared to be especially interested in Graham’s evangelistic meetings in Europe. Both men draw on a rich tradition of Christian Scripture to make their points. But unlike personality-centered Protestant meetings, Catholic rallies place as much emphasis on pageantry and worship as they do on preaching the Word.

From a psychological perspective, bigger-than-life pageantry can pay off for the church even if it doesn’t make evangelists out of everyone.

It is what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence, USC sociologist Miller said. “At that moment when the ritual is really at its peak moment of intensity, you lose consciousness of your individual self and you are part of a collective group.”

Father Norman A. Supancheck of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Fillmore, Calif., recalled a mass meeting he attended in St. Peter’s Square in 1975.

“We got into St. Peter’s Square, 100,000 people from every country in the world and all of us praising our Father together. I just about cried. I just couldn’t believe it. Every place you looked there were people in every language and all of a sudden we were bonded by the prayer to our God.

“I think that will touch a lot of the kids, too, in Denver. To see so many kids bonded together in one thing--they believe in Jesus and are part of the (universal) church. I think it’s going to blow their minds.”

“It’s not like a bunch of elderly ladies praying,” said 16-year-old Jeff Bowman of Diamond Bar, Calif., who traveled to Denver with the 2,000-strong Los Angeles delegation. “It’s something you can relate to. You get to see part of America, and when you get there (Denver) you get to see one of the most important people in the whole world.”

The differences between the institutionalized church and the rank-and-file on some issues are not likely to diminish the personal regard young people hold for John Paul, according to social psychologist C. Daniel Batson of the University of Kansas at Lawrence.

“To some degree, the fact that he preaches a message that they cannot endorse may actually raise him in their eyes because he lives by a different standard. (They say) he really must be ‘other worldly’ because he’s asking people to do what we really cannot do. It’s an interesting divorce,” said Batson, an authority on the psychology of religion.

The church can benefit in other ways. “The spiritual highs can become the basis for tolerating the weakness and the blindness of the institution,” said Father Terrance A. Sweeney, who was banned from the active priesthood after he broke his vows of celibacy and married.

That is not to say that the Pope’s charisma can’t work wonders.

Even skeptics acknowledge that something special can happen when individuals come face to face with John Paul. If the Pope’s travels around the world are any indication, young people are drawn by the strength of his personality and his position as a leading world figure.

Many who saw him during his nine-city American tour in 1987 still light up when they relive the experience.

“To me it was very emotional,” recalled Berta Medina, 52, of Van Nuys, who sang in the choir for a papal Mass in Los Angeles. “It was a big event, one of the biggest I’ve felt in my life. When he waved, I felt he was waving at me, too, because he waved to the choir!”

Medina said that she was a devoted Catholic before she saw the Pope. Did she find it easier to share her faith with others? “Not to that point. I did share with fellow worshipers, but not to strangers,” she said.

In that respect, Medina is not unusual. Only 31% of Roman Catholics feel a responsibility to share their beliefs with others, compared to 57% of Protestants, according to a poll released last week by Barna Research Group, Ltd. in Glendale.

“I hear it all the time,” said Bowman, the teen-ager from Diamond Bar. “We’re supposed to go out and speak the word of God. But it’s really not socially acceptable because they think you’re a religious wacko or something--like over the edge. You don’t want to offend anybody because they might be atheists or something, and you don’t want to get into an argument,” Bowman continued.

The Barna survey found that the more educated and affluent Americans are, the less likely they are to share their faith with others. American Catholic youth today fit that profile more than earlier generations of Catholic teen-agers, according to a Gallup Youth Survey released last week.

The Barna study found that 54% of those who earned less than $20,000 a year felt strongly about sharing their religious beliefs. But only 34% of those earning more than $60,000 a year felt as strongly.

Likewise, 54% of those without any college education said evangelism was very important, compared to 37% of college graduates.

If a newly kindled faith is to be kept burning, much will depend upon how effective local parishes are in following up the initiatives launched by the Pope in Denver.

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, in remarks to thousands of World Youth Day participants Friday, acknowledged the difficulties of evangelization. “It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and the momentum of this experience of church in Denver,” Mahony said. But their task, he said, is to “go down the mountain” to live the Gospel in the real world where the church can be far less dynamic, where conscience conflicts with church teaching and “scandal is louder than good works.”

The Los Angeles archdiocese plans a reunion for its World Youth Day delegates in October. “We will give them the skills, a format and a vehicle for sharing so that it will be something that is not just a flash-in-the-pan experience,” said Sister Anne Joseph Crookston, who helped coordinate the Los Angeles archdiocese’s participation in World Youth Day.

Father Andrew M. Greeley, a Catholic sociologist at the University of Chicago and at times a critic of the church hierarchy, agrees that such efforts are important. “I am not, in all candor, sure that the papal performance will make that much difference,” he said. “It is the parents and parish priests that make the difference in their lives.”

Whether young people attending World Youth Day will return home as Catholic evangelists remains to be seen, but few doubt that the young people will be touched.

“I think if we look for one shining moment, the shining moment is World Youth Day as an incredible high,” said Sister Crookston. “But you don’t live on that level all the time. What we look for is an individual gift and individual people responding and opening their hearts and lives to God--and doing it one at a time. . . . One person at a time makes it successful.”

Sharing Their Faith

Evangelism is less important to Catholics than to other groups. The chart shows the percentage of people in selected groups who think they should share their religious beliefs with others.

Born-again Christians: 71%

African-Americans: 62%

Regular church attenders*: 59%

Protestants: 57%

Live in the South: 56%

Without any college education: 54%

Earn less than %20,000 per year: 54%

Anglos: 44%

Live in the Northeast: 38%

College graduates: 37%

Earn more than $60,000 per year: 34%

Latinos: 32%

Catholics: 31%

* Attend church twice or more per month

The survey was conducted by Barna Research Group, Ltd. in February, 1993, and interviewed 542 adults nationwide. It has a margin of error or plus or minus three percentage points.