“I grew up in a Catholic family but this year I felt a hollow in my faith, begins Axelle, 18, brown hair pulled up in a bun. In my first year of nursing school, I was surrounded by a lot of non-believers. I wanted to come here to grow my faith. » Sitting alongside other young people around a table placed on trestles, in the middle of a meadow decorated with garlands and surrounded by three capitals, the teenager shares with her neighbors the reasons for her coming to the Christian festival Welcome to Paradise.
Organized by the Chemin-Neuf community since 1993 in the idyllic setting of Hautecombe Abbey (Savoie), which overlooks the turquoise waters of Lake Bourget, the event welcomes, between July 17 and August 12, more of 2,000 young Christians, aged 18 to 30 – including nearly 1,000 foreigners. This year, the festival is spread over four weeks, compared to the single week of previous years, to “to reach more widely”, according to the words of Mustapha Amari, responsible for the festival and brother of the community.
Holidays and spirituality
“The problem of the decline of the Church is not the message of Christ but the way of transmitting it”, he says. Faced with this, the “young people” team of the Chemin-Neuf community has developed an “à la carte” formula, designed to “combining holidays and spirituality”, in a setting that incorporates all the codes of the festival: giant tents, colored pennants, scattered campsites and flocked recyclable glass. With times of prayer in the morning, of praise in the abbey and a daily mass at 12:15 p.m., celebrated under the big tent, imprinted with the charismatic DNA of the community.
Around the table, at the end of the first “frat” lunch – small groups of around ten festival-goers formed at random to encourage encounters – everyone testifies to what they came to find at Welcome to Paradise. “Today, I don’t know if I consider myself a believer, I don’t even know if I have faith, says Astrid, 18. I don’t know if I came for the right reasons since I came mainly to be with my cousins.” she smiles, alongside Axelle and Marie, 21 years old.
The latter continues: “This year I lost friends and I felt very lonely…I began to pray more regularly. Here, I seek inner peace. she says, moved. Next door, Quentin, red T-shirt and sports shorts, recognizes “not knowing why he is there”. “I have been a believer for less than a year, I wanted to do a retreat and I called Hautecombe. They told me there was the festival and offered to come: I said yes,” he smiles, encouraged by his neighbour: “It’s super brave! »
Strong experience
If most of the festival-goers are young people from families of Catholic tradition, some, more distant from the Church, come here to seek answers, or at least a strong spiritual experience. Like Paul, a 23-year-old student who arrived “a bit by default” to fill his two months vacation. “I am not a devout Catholic and I do not have a simple relationship with God, he acknowledges, cap screwed on his head, piercing blue eyes behind black-rimmed glasses. It’s not my cup of tea, but I want to stay in a spiritual process, so I’m giving myself the opportunity to see, to make my own opinion this week. » The previous week, several young non-believers testified to having felt ” something “ at the end of five days.
All the ingredients are thus brought together to experience intense spiritual moments, which carry young people in their faith. “My secret dream would be to make a free festival for non-believers, because non-believers are not willing to pay €200 for a Christian event”, admits Mustapha Amari, although fundraising this year allowed the price to be lowered to €150 per week, not including transport.
The challenge for the organizers is above all to succeed in anchoring this fervor among young people over the long term. “Many go home with the fire, but they lose it during the year”, acknowledges the festival manager. In fact, the event welcomes more than 1,000 newcomers this year – a figure which caused a bug in the computer file. The sign of a certain attraction but also of a difficulty in retaining young people with an “à la carte” religious practice.
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Workshops related to the news
Beyond spiritual times and sporting and recreational activities, the days of young festival-goers are punctuated by “workshops”, conferences with very diverse speakers. From Father Philippe Demeestère to the Dutch pastor Henk Stoorvogel, via Mgr Luc Ravel or Brother Aloïs de Taizé, the organizers wanted to represent different sensibilities of Christianity – in the spirit of ecumenism dear to the Chemin-Neuf community. Among the long list of speakers, Jean-Marc Sauvé, president of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (Ciase), made the trip for two workshops “Abuse in the Church: Listen, Recognize, Reconstruct”.
Christian festival: at “Welcome to Paradise”, the challenge of anchoring the faith in young people