Recent Vatican concert embraces infantile claptrap and correlationism

Last week, my inbox was inundated with people writing about the recent concert in St. Peter’s Square. For those who missed it, the “Grace for the World” concert was held on September 13th, and it remains available on demand on Disney+ for all its subscribers.

I did not see the concert, and I won’t be paying Disney money to view it. I did, however, trawl through the media reports and discovered some names I had never heard before.

Perplexing choices for performers

First, there was someone whose stage name is “Jelly Roll,” a rapper who was once convicted for aggravated robbery and drug dealing, but by age 39 had decided to become an “unconventional Christian.” His Wikipedia entry mentioned that he had once performed with Snoop Dogg.

I had heard of Snoop Dogg, but only because he was once denied entry to Australia by the late Kevin Andrews, then the Minister for Immigration. I googled “Kevin Andrews and Snoop Dogg” and found the 2007 story where Kevin, who was a devout Catholic, defended his decision to stop Snoop Dogg from entering Australia with the argument: “He has a whole string of convictions. He doesn’t seem the sort of bloke we want in this country.” Bravo, Kevin Andrews!

Then I discovered the name “Bam Bam.” Another Google search revealed that Bam Bam is a Thai rapper and singer based in South Korea, and a member of the South Korean boy band Got7. I then Googled “Bam Bam and drugs.” The top hit was a statement from Bam Bam explaining the meaning of his song “Bags Packed.” He said, “In all honesty, this track is about taking mushrooms. I was visiting my family, who live in Bali, and we ended up having a party at home. My mum gave us all a bunch of mushies and the rest is a bit of a blur. All I know is that I woke up and I had written this song. Seems to go alright. Haha. Somehow, in my tripped-out state, I managed to subconsciously write it to be very ambiguous.” On the same page, Bam Bam also explained that another of his songs, “She Wanna Get Down,” was “just a song about having sex with someone you really want to have sex with.”

By now, I had decided that I needed to get out of Bam Bam’s page before I found myself having to explain to some Human Resources compliance officer why I am not guilty of using my work computer to access pornography. I returned to a secular newspaper report on the concert and found some more new names. The first was Pharrell Williams, who reportedly sang a song called “Happy.” I googled the lyrics and found them to be beyond banal, including the line—“clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth”! To my ears, that sounded more like Buddhism than Catholicism. According to another newspaper report, Williams shouted to the crowd: “In this historic moment, I ask you to choose grace. Choose curiosity. Choose them until they become contagious. And, together, we will flood the world with this light and this love.” Grace was otherwise reportedly defined as “the light within us.” What curiosity has to do with anything, apart from being a danger to cats, I do not know.

The final name I dared to investigate was Karol G. Her Wikipedia entry mentioned that she is a Colombian singer and that one of her top hits was something called “Pineapple.” I then ventured onto YouTube and watched the first 20 seconds or so of her Pineapple video. It began with her in a jungle, wearing not very much, stroking a python, and gesturing towards her private parts. I did not need more than the first 20 seconds of that to be convinced that the people who had written to me from internet space to download their sense of despair had a point.

The secular newspaper reports also mentioned that the concert featured some Catholic classics, like Andrea Bocelli singing Schubert’s Ave Maria, and there was a contribution from Fr. Marco Frasina, who is the director of the Pastoral Worship Center at the Vatican. Frasina is one name I did not need to Google. I particularly like his Ci chi separerà (“Let nothing separate us from the love of God”) and Aprite le porte e Cristo (“Open the Doors to Christ”)—the latter composed for the beatification Mass of John Paul II. I assume that his contribution would have been quite different from that of Karol G. et.al.

What was the point and purpose?

So, what was this event? Who was it for? What was it meant to achieve? Did someone really think that inviting people from the seedier quarters of the entertainment industry to sing in St. Peter’s Square would convert them to Christ, or convert their followers to Christ? And if not, why have it? Why pay the Church’s money to people for some non-edifying performance (Bocelli’s Schubert recital and Frasina excepted) that scandalizes faithful Catholics?

To me, as someone who remembers the 1970s, this has the hallmarks of a warmed-up correlationism—the idea that the best way to evangelize the world is to correlate the faith to whatever is regarded as fashionable.

To illustrate the concept of correlationism for students born decades after the 1960s, I show them a YouTube video clip of the hymn Sons of God that was featured on the 1966 recording of The Mass for Young Americans. In the video, a bunch of teenage girls wearing mostly shorts and t-shirts, though in one case, a skimpy nightdress, are dancing around a wood singing the hymn while strumming guitars. In one scene, a McDonald’s hamburger carry bag is lying on the ground, and a cat is crawling out of it. At the end of the clip, the girls’ guitars are resting against the trees in the woods. There is nothing in the video that is remotely Eucharistic, even though the hymn was written to be sung at Communion. There is no monstrance, no host, not even some grapes and sheaves of wheat. The clip simply features girls looking alluring while playing guitars. Somehow, Eucharistic communion is being “marketed” by an association with attractive girls, cute cats, McDonald’s burgers, and above all, guitars!

If we apply 1960s correlationism to an analysis of what recently happened in St. Peter’s Square, the reasoning is something like this: if Bam Bam is “cool” and the Church invites Bam Bam to sing in its headquarters, then people who think that Bam Bam is cool will then think that the Church is cool, and once they think that the Church is cool, they will all start queuing for baptism.

The sociologists, however, tell us that it doesn’t work this way. Those parts of the Church where correlationism most flourished, like Belgium and Germany, are now spiritual wastelands. Quite apart from whatever criticisms one may make of it theologically, it just does not attract people to the Church, and the youth are turned off by it. A young Cardinal Ratzinger once called it “infantile claptrap” and noted that the Church is not a haberdashery shop that updates its windows with the arrival of each new fashion season.

Moreover, just because people are young does not mean that they are stupid. They can tell when they are being infantilized, and they deeply resent it. They run away because they long for something truly beautiful and truly transcendent. Some become Nietzscheans and console themselves listening to Wagner, others become rad trad rebels, and yet others just feel sad and do not know where to go. Some also find an experience of the transcendent in what Bam Bam called “mushies.”

A fruitless exercise in gradualism?

Another reading of the St. Peter’s Square concert is that it was an exercise in what is called “gradualism.” This is the idea that you cannot wean neo-pagans off their idols by simply presenting them with the alternative of Christ. The concept is often used in the context of the problems faced by missionaries in parts of the world where there is no Christian heritage. A century ago, it was not unusual for missionaries to find themselves in a situation where they were trying to evangelise pagan people who followed practices like polygamy. The missionaries would say that they could not just walk into a jungle and start telling men with several wives legitimately recognized by tribal law to suddenly become monogamous. Which of their various wives would they dump? What would happen to the children of the dumped? Thus, the missionaries had to gradually wean the younger generations off the pre-Christian practices.

In recent times, it has been suggested that the same attitude should be taken toward the neo-pagans in first-world countries. Instead of being repelled by people who merch cheap sexual intimacy to masses of youth who know nothing higher, the idea is that ecclesial leaders should offer hospitality to the neo-pagan pop culture leaders and make them feel loved. Here, the mentality is something like, if we make them feel welcome and loved, then maybe they will not hate us so much, and indeed, maybe they might even come to agree with us in time.

The buzzword associated with gradualism is “accompaniment.” Someone who is a practicing Catholic is needed to accompany the pagans on their journey to Christianity; otherwise, they go nowhere. They accept the hospitality but remain pagans.

If gradualism is the justification for the St. Peter’s Square concert, then it raises the question: Has some ecclesial leader been appointed to help Pharrell Williams understand that Christ, not happiness, is the Truth? And will there be ecclesial leaders keeping in touch with Williams and company to answer their ongoing theological questions, assuming they have some? And what pastoral care will be offered to the scandalized Catholics, including the scandalized Catholic youth, who followed the whole show and who are aware of how far it sank below baseline standards of Catholic culture? Who will be consoling them and counselling them against despair?

Yet another possibility is that it was all just a bureaucratic misadventure—what British Army Officers call a SNAFU—same as normal, all a FU! Snafus occur quite often in large organizations. There only needs to be one maliciously intentioned person in the decision-making process. Busy ecclesial leaders sign off on things that underlings have organized without really knowing what they are agreeing to—without knowing anything about Bam Bam or Karol G.

I have no idea of the dynamics that brought the concert into being, and the above three scenarios are simply justifications or mitigations that occur to me as possibilities.

Christ needs to be at the center

What I do know is that if we ask, “What should we do about it?” the answer is that we should bellow out that truth, beauty, and goodness are inseparable. We can’t have one without the other two! And this means that we cannot have beauty and goodness if we want to sideline Christ.

Moreover, just shouting out words like “joy,” “peace,” “love,” and “grace” achieves absolutely nothing if the joy is not legitimately the fruit of the Holy Spirit, if the peace is not the peace of Christ, if love is confused with non-spousal sexual entanglements, and if grace is so misunderstood as to be described as something we choose for ourselves, rather than being, as the Church teaches, a gratuitous divine gift.

The person who understood better than any theologian of his generation how profoundly puerile the correlationist approach to evangelization is was Joseph Ratzinger, and April 2027 will mark the centenary of his birth. Perhaps what we need now is to focus on preparing for this anniversary by thinking of ways in which, in his memory, we can organize concerts that truly showcase Catholic culture and eschew what he described as infantile claptrap.

(Editor’s note: This essay was posted originally on the “What We Need Now” site in slightly different form and is posted here with kind permission.)