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Nope to the Pope or A Nod to God?


Pope Francis
In case you've been living under a rock and starved of wi-fi for the past couple of months, you'll be aware that the Pope is coming to Ireland this summer. He'll be hosting a big summer bash known as the World Meeting of the Families (except the single-parent families or the gay ones, of course). This culminates in a very, very big mass in Dublin's Phoenix Park on Sunday August 26th. The last time a Pope said mass in the Phoenix Park, there were over million people in attendance.

This mass has been the source of scandal over the past number of days which I will explain presently. Tickets are available for free through this site. The catchy and instantly-hashtaggable 'Say Nope to the Pope' campaign took off in recent days. To be honest, calling it a 'campaign' would be giving it an air of legitimacy which I believe it does not merit, so lets be real. It's a Facebook event set up encouraging people to claim free tickets with no intention of going to the mass.

Here's the current status of the Facebook event.

It seems that notwithstanding this stunt, there is considerable demand for tickets to the Papal mass. According to the Irish Times, 285,000 of the available 500,000 tickets were snapped-up the day they were made available. As of Tuesday evening there were 100,000 tickets left. Unlike with Taylor Swift in Croke Park, it seems that people actually want free tickets to see the Pope.

"Wats de big ideeya?" as Alan Partridge would say. 

Well... those claiming the free tickets want to ensure the turnout at the event is low with the aim of irritating the Catholic Church. I wouldn't say the Catholic Church's primary concern is the numbers of people attending the event: they know that the Pope is popular.

As it currently stands there is a mere 1,500 people marked as 'Going' on the Facebook event, and another 4,700 marked as 'Interested'. You can presume that not everyone who has registered their interest on the Facebook event page has actually gone to the effort of applying for the tickets, and that not everyone who has applied for the tickets with no intention of going has bothered announcing their decision on Facebook. Adding both those figures together and you get 6,200 bandwagoners acting as part of this orchestrated cynical stunt. That's just above 1% of all the available tickets, so it isn't exactly going to spoil the party for the Church.

So Gavin, if it isn't going to spoil the party, why does it matter? It matters because it is a petty attack on those who actually want to attend. If enough people claim their free tickets with no intention of going, there will be 6,200 people who wish to go but will not be able to directly as a result of the cynical actions of others. Really, the people that this is targeting are those with genuine religious convictions. These people are probably not Catholic Church apologists, they aren't responsible for the many scandals over the years, they don't necessarily share the same conservative views on marriage and sexuality as the Church: most probably just have a strong personal faith and wish to partake in what is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I was born in 1998. I was raised as Catholic but have never been particularly religious. The Catholic Church has seldom, if ever, been subject to good publicity in my lifetime. We've had the sexual abuse scandals (since the 2005 Ferns report), dwindling numbers of people attending mass, struggles to attract people (or should I say men) to the priesthood, adoption scandals and criticisms over the Church staying steadfast in an Ireland which has cast off its once patriarchal, conservative veil. In other words, I am no Catholic Church cheerleader and I can understand clearly why people would want to protest against the Church. This protest is the wrong way of venting anger. In other words: I understand the ends, as such, I just disagree with the means.

In this instance, I feel that there are more courageous and effective forms of protest if people wish to vent their anger towards the Catholic Church. Filling out an online form to deny well-intentioned people the option to have the once-in-a-lifetime experience of seeing the Pope is, as An Taoiseach described it, 'petty and mean-spirited'.

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