Catholic Youngsters Prepare for World Youth Day

Nearly 1 million young Catholics around the globe are preparing for a historic World Youth Day this month that, according to many observers, will signal the vitality of the church’s future generation – and that generation’s affection for its new shepherd, Pope Benedict XVI.Some of the New Yorkers preparing to leave for Cologne, Germany, for the 11-day gathering for prayer, fellowship, and communion expressed confidence yesterday that Benedict will be embraced by a sizable, enthusiastic flock, and that the gathering will provide an important international network for the city’s Catholics. Initiated by Pope John Paul II in 1985, World Youth Day, for Catholics between 16 and 30, has enjoyed widespread popularity – often cited as evidence of that pontiff’s tremendous rapport with the young. It sometimes has drawn millions of worshippers during the final open-air Masses.The location of World Youth Day rotates, and it has been said that the site of this year’s gathering, announced at the close of the 2002 World Youth Day in Toronto, was providential.Four months have passed since a bookish cardinal from Germany named Joseph Ratzinger ascended the throne of St. Peter. While he deftly consoled the nearly 1 billion members of the Catholic church during the days following the death of Pope John Paul II in Rome, Benedict will return to his home country for the first major test of his pastoral ability, at the first World Youth Day celebrated without its founder.While some of Benedict’s critics had predicted in April that the new pontiff, purportedly lacking the charisma and media skills of his predecessor, would be unable to match John Paul’s World Youth Day success, some young New York Catholics dismissed the idea yesterday as they shared their expectations of the event.The managing editor of First Things, a New York-based journal of religion, Erik Ross, said yesterday that most people headed for World Youth Day “are going over conscious that the world is watching how young people are going to react to Pope Benedict.”“They’re very much aware of almost voting with their feet,”Mr.Ross, 28, said.“They all want to stand there in solidarity with the new pope,” he said.One New York Catholic attending World Youth Day, Geoffrey Gentile, 25, said that using this year’s event as a measuring stick to compare Benedict with John Paul misses the point of the gathering.“Not even Benedict is the center of this event,” Mr. Gentile, a Manhattan resident and Wall Street trader, said. “Jesus Christ is the center of this event.” The theme of this year’s World Youth Day is “We have come to worship Him.”Mr. Gentile said that this would be his first World Youth Day and that while he was unsure of what the gathering would bring, he anticipated “almost a little foretaste of Heaven – being surrounded by a community of believers with the sole purpose of coming to worship and be in communion with each other.”For Sister Mary Gabriel Devlin, 30, of the Sisters of Life – a Bronx-based religious order founded in 1991 by John Cardinal O’Connor – part of the purpose of her World Youth Day experience will be to inspire young people questioning whether they should pursue vocations in the church.Society, Sister Mary Gabriel said, often presents a stereotype of the vocational life as being fraught with unhappiness. By bearing enthusiastic witness to her calling and her faith, she said, she hoped to inform and excite others attending World Youth Day.Sister Mary Gabriel labeled the experience “liberating,” adding that while most contemporary social interactions are defined by materialistic markers, such as one’s appearance or income, the atmosphere at World Youth Day is like being at “a big family reunion” where those gathered are concerned only with finding joy in their faith and in discovering how genuinely catholic the Roman Catholic church is.One New Yorker familiar with the appeal of World Youth Day, Anna Halpine, 27, founder and president of the New York-based World Youth Alliance, said the organization is taking around 100 young people from 18 countries to Germany. Around 20 of them, she said, will be New Yorkers.According to World Youth Day’s official press materials, around 800,000 young Catholics are expected to descend on Cologne, accompanied by 600 bishops and 4,000 journalists. While participants are already making their way to Germany in advance of the gathering, the first major phase of World Youth Day will take place between next Thursday and August 15, as pilgrims from 120 countries on six continents spend time in parishes around Germany traveling with local hosts.From August 16 to 21, they will congregate in Cologne for a series of seminars and Masses. Pope Benedict is scheduled to arrive on August 18 to greet the pilgrims, and to lead them the next day in the Way of the Cross around the city, calling on his followers to reflect on Christ’s Passion. August 20 will bring all of the pilgrims and the pope to an open-air venue outside Cologne, where Benedict will watch over his flock as they observe an all-night vigil. On August 21, the pontiff will celebrate a climactic open-air Mass that could draw as many as 1 million followers. There he will announce the location of the next World Youth Day.In between, Ms. Halpine said, her group will be participating in the myriad activities available for young Catholics to interact with their co-religionists from around the world – from seminars debating the dignity of the human person to meeting with one of hundreds of priests at the multilingual “confession cities” that abound at World Youth Day.Ms. Halpine, who said this will be her fourth World Youth Day, expressed conviction that Benedict’s following would be as enthusiastic as his predecessor’s, pointing out that World Youth Day was an institution that transcended any one man.“John Paul II was not creating a friendship with youth based on his personality. He was challenging young people to know and explore the truth about themselves,” Ms. Halpine said. “And Pope Benedict will be doing the same thing, repeating these same truths, and offering a real challenge to these young people to conform their lives to the truth.”

Catholic Youngsters Prepare for World Youth Day

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