In the face of terror, Catholic youth delivered the answer

Author: Kresta in the Afternoon Published on: August 1, 2016 Published in: New Evangelization & Discipleship

800px-World_Youth_Day_2011_Mass

KRAKOW, Poland – World Youth Day, a massive gathering of Catholic youth from all across the planet that’s sometimes tongue-in-cheek been dubbed the “Catholic Woodstock,” took place in Krakow, Poland, July 25-31, bringing together what organizers estimated at two million people for a festival of fun, food and faith.

Consider what had taken place in the world in just the month before those young people descended on Krakow. This, by the way, is merely a partial list.

In Bahrain on July 1, militants detonated a bomb that killed a woman and three children.
Also on July 1, gunmen on the West Bank fired at a passing vehicle, killing a Jewish yeshiva head and injuring his wife and children.
On July 2, gunmen linked to the radical Islamic group al-Shabaab launched 11 mortars at civilian targets in Somalia, killing two young girls aged four and five and injuring 19 civilians.
On July 3, at least 325 people were killed and 245 injured in a series of coordinated bombings in Baghdad.
On July 4, Islamic State militants kidnapped 40 civilians in a Syrian town in Aleppo province and later executed them for trying to escape.
Five police officers in Dallas were killed and seven others wounded on July 7, in an attack motivated by rage over police shootings of black males by police in various U.S. locales.
At least 36 people were killed on July 9 and 143 people injured after mortar and other attacks in Aleppo, Syria, carried out by rebel terrorist groups.
On July 14, 84 people were killed and 308 injured when a 31-year-old Tunisian man drove a truck through a crowd celebrating France’s Bastille Day, in an incident that also left the attacker dead.
In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a July 17 ambush on police left three people dead and three others injured.
The next day, an assault on a police station in Almaty, Kazakhstan, left six people dead and eight others injured.
In Würzburg, Germany, an attack on a train carried out by an axe-wielding 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker left five people injured, two of them critically, and the attacker dead.
On July 26, a 26-year old broke into a Japanese hospital and stabbed 44 people, killing 19, almost all of them disabled, and then surrendered to the police claiming that people with disabilities need to disappear.
On the same day, Islamic State-inspired assassins slit the throat of a Catholic priest and seriously wounded a woman in a church in Normandy, France, and were themselves killed by French security forces.

In all, 1,843 people have perished as a result of terrorist actions in July, according to statistics collected by Wikipedia, and that doesn’t count the totals from incidents in which the number of dead are listed as “unknown.”