"If anything seemed clear in 1978, it was that young people around the world, and particularly in the West, simply weren't interested in what Catholicism had to offer. That wasn't clear to Karol Wojtyla, however. He had been a pied piper for the young for thirty years when he assumed the papacy; the young people he had first met when they were students in Stalinist-era Poland and he was a newly ordained university chaplain ... were not different from the young people of the late 20th century, he was convinced. The yearnings, aspirations, fears, and muddles of adolescence and young adulthood remained the same. He had always thought of this as a privileged period of life, a time when a genuine human personality begins to be formed; he thought the Church should be present to young lives at those crucial moments of maturation and vocational discernment; the questions 'Who am I?' and 'What am I supposed to be?' were God-touched, and the Church should be engaged with those raising such fundamental questions of identity and purpose. The traditional managers of Popes ... told him not to waste his time, that it was impossible. He disagreed, and by launching the World Youth Days that drew millions of young men and women from all over the world for an encounter with Christ, each other, and the Pope, he created one of the signature innovations of his Pontificate.
'His magnetism for the young didn't fade with time, and the question was raised time and again: How did he do it? The world-weary, the cynical, or those who simply couldn't imagine any other answer chalked it up to the celebrity-fascination of the young. But as the years went on and the Pope got older, slower, more bent, and more difficult to understand, he certainly didn't seem like any other celebrity on offer. The truth lay elsewhere. John Paul II remained immensely attractive to young people, until the day he died, for two reasons. He was a man of transparent integrity, which is itself compelling for young men and women who have acute noses for hypocrisy. John Paul never asked a young person to do anything he hadn't done, or to struggle with any spiritual dilemma with which he hadn't wrestled; young people understood that, and appreciated it. Then there was his challenge. He knews, from his work with students in Poland, that adolescence and young adulthood are naturally times to dream large dreams, including dreams of the heroic and dramatic. That was the challenge he laid out in World Youth Days in Rome, Buenos Aires, Compostela, Czestochowa, Denver, Manila, Paris, and Toronto: never settle for less than the spiritual and moral grandeur of which, with God's grace, you're capable. Don't sell yourself short. You will fail. That's no reason to lower the bar of expectation. Get up, dust yourself off, seek forgiveness and reconciliation--and try again. That's the drama of the spiritual life. Live it."
(George Weigel, God's Choice, pp 71-73)
