Thousands of young Catholics have converged upon the city of Cologne, Germany to see the Pope and, more importantly, to share and celebrate their faith.
World Youth Day has a packed schedule for the youngsters with daily Mass, church visits, lectures on Catholic teaching just some of the events to occupy the young pilgrims who have travelled from countries the world across, including some in which Christianity is still threatened daily with oppression.
Others have come from countries in which Christianity is now part of the daily vocabulary and are facing a threat of a different kind: that of rising secularism and cynicism.
“It’s a large part of my life, but its kind of hard to have it be a large part of my life, because you get made fun of a lot,” said Ellen Anderson, 16, of Hanover, Massachusetts, just one of around 350 high school and college students from the Archdiocese of Boston who are attending World Youth Day. She said, “I’m looking to enrich my faith.”
World Youth Day has been doing just that since it started on Tuesday. Pope Benedict XVI, in the first foreign visit of his pontificate, will arrive Thursday and give an outdoor Mass on Sunday.
Around 400,000 youngsters have already registered for the event, say organisers, although numbers are expected to rise toward Sunday.
City streets are reaching almost full capacity, particularly around the Cathedral area, as many of the World Youth Day participants wrangle for entry to the Cathedral for the chance to see a gold sarcophagus that, according to church officials, contains relics of the three magi who paid homage to the baby Jesus 2,000 years ago.
Andersen was one of the many pilgrims from the Boston area who said they had turned to Catholicism after drifting away in their earlier childhoods. They agreed that they found solace from Mass and from the Church’s values. Their increased activism comes interestingly at the same time as parish closures and sex abuse scandals continue to rock the Catholic Church.
