Young Catholics may prove a tough crowd for Pope

COLOGNE, Germany (Reuters) – Pope Benedict will face the
toughest crowd of his four-month-old papacy when he visits the
World Youth Day festival in Germany, where more than 400,000
lively young Catholics are expected to greet him.

Although the youngsters from almost 200 countries are
guaranteed to give the 78-year-old German a hearty reception,
Benedict will come under scrutiny not only for what he tells
his audience but the amount of charm and warmth he can muster.

Benedict is clearly not as comfortable with the limelight
as his predecessor Pope John Paul — a former actor who
relished a chance to bring a crowd of millions to its feet and
often did so at the youth jamborees he launched in the 1980s.

While Benedict has overcome some stage-fright since his
April election, leading cardinals have said he will not attempt
to replicate John Paul’s winning formula but find his own
style.

During his regular papal audience on Wednesday, Benedict
asked for prayers for his “apostolic pilgrimage.”

“This is an important Church event and we all hope it will
bring much spiritual fruit for the entire Church, which is
counting much on the commitment and witness of young people to
the Gospel,” he said.

Vatican watchers are looking for signals on how the Pope
intends to keep Catholics faithful to the Church and the
relations he intends to forge with Jews, Protestants and
Muslims, all of whom he will visit while in Germany.

They will also be listening for how Benedict handles hot
topics like pre-marital sex or allowing condom use to fight
AIDS. The Pope opposes both, but the young people who will
cheer him here may not all agree.

PREDECESSOR LOOMS LARGE

Pope John Paul was 65 when he hosted his first World Youth
Day, whereas Benedict is 78. Following the pattern set by John
Paul, the German-born pontiff will hold meetings with young
people and celebrate a huge open-air Mass on Sunday.

In the square outside Cologne’s soaring gothic cathedral a
huge poster shows a smiling new Pope beckoning his young flock.
But around the corner hangs an even larger image of John Paul
– a mosaic made with thousands of passport photos.

Late on Tuesday hundreds of Polish pilgrims held a vigil
beneath the image of their beloved compatriot, singing and
waving their red-and-white flags.

Organizers said there would be no extra security for the
Pope after the fatal stabbing in France on Tuesday of Brother
Roger, one of the 20th century’s leading ecumenical figures.

“I don’t know how we could make security any tighter,” said
Father Heiner Koch, secretary general of the WYD. He noted that
Brother Roger would not have been surrounded by bodyguards in
his church, as the Pope would be here.

Hermann-Josef Johanns, another WYD official, said 325,000
youths from 184 countries had arrived in Cologne so far. “We
are all very surprised how many have turned up,” he said.

The armies of young pilgrims streaming through Cologne and
nearby Bonn and Duesseldorf had caused unexpected problems
because they sometimes blocked whole streets they were not
expected to use, city traffic official Franz Wolf Ramien said.

“They are more mobile, more fit and more merry than we
expected,” he told journalists.