Word: pope
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...Pope Benedict XVI is 81. The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, is 67. The median age of Australia's regular Catholic churchgoers is 58. The quarter-million pilgrims who've flocked to Sydney to celebrate World Youth Day are, well... young. But the 2,000-year-old Church that still prints official documents in Latin and the 20-year-olds snapping photos of the Pope on disposable cameras seem to be having a blast together. "The task of young people is to bring fire into the Church," Pell said on Wednesday, after joining 4,400 priests...
...pilgrims are happy to oblige. At a rock concert after the service, they formed conga lines and sang along to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U." Next day, when the Pope disembarked from a "boat-a-cade" on Sydney Harbor to address the crowds for the first time, the shouts and cheers out-decibeled any rock show...
Australia is an apt venue for World Youth Day, the Pope said, because its Church is "the youngest on any continent." The oldest pontiff to be elected since the 18th century is reputed to own an iPod and sends a daily SMS message to pilgrims, signing off "BXVI." Young people in turn have been invited to send text messages for display on giant "prayer wall" screens around the city. Event coordinator Bishop Anthony Fisher says planners want to make WYD memorable "by using new ways to connect with today's tech-savvy youth...
...visitors - more than 125,000 from overseas and 100,000 from around Australia - are in Sydney for World Youth Day, a week-long celebration of Catholic faith that will culminate July 21 in a Mass on the city's Randwick Racecourse. On Monday, while Pope Benedict XVI recovered from jet lag in a rural retreat, throngs chanted hymns and took turns carrying a 12-foot (3.8-m) wooden cross through the city's streets. In St. Mary's Cathedral, people lit candles and knelt to pray before a casket holding the remains of Italian youth worker Pier Giorgio Frassati, which...
...Pope has said he wants his visit to help revitalize the Catholic faith in Australia. Fewer than one in five of the country's 5 million Catholics attends mass regularly; among twentysomethings the rate is about 7%. After plummeting in the 1970s and '80s, the number of priestly vocations is growing steadily, but the average age of priests is still nearly 60. And the Church is under attack for refusing to ordain women or condone homosexual behavior as well as for its handling of cases of sexual abuse by priests and brothers. Protesters have prepared their own World Youth...