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Young Catholics may prove a tough crowd for Pope

Posted on: Wednesday, 17 August 2005, 08:14 CDT

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.

Source: REUTERS

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