SYDNEY, JULY 20, 2008:
Pope Benedict XVI urged hundreds of thousands of young Catholics this morning to beat back a "spiritual desert" spreading through the modern world as he closed the World Youth Day in Australia. The Pope celebrated an open-air mass in Sydney that drew some 250,000 people, mostly youngsters, in the climax of a week of prayer and pop concerts. The Pope flew by helicopter over many thousands of pilgrims, many of whom had camped out in cold weather at Sydney's Randwick Racecourse in preparation for Sunday's events. In the closing mass of the WYD, the Pope said the worshippers' youthful energy helped reinvigorate the church and urged them to become "messengers of love" to counter a world that was increasingly spiritually barren. "The world needs this renewal," he said. "In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading, an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair." Pope Benedict XVI, who has repeatedly railed against consume
rism and greed through the week, said that God was asking young people to be "prophets for a new age" in which "hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deadens our souls and poisons our relationships". Bidding "arrivederci" to the massive crowd at Royal Randwick Racecourse, the Pope announced that the next World Youth Day would be held in Madrid in 2011. "Until then, let us continue to pray for one another and let us joyfully bear witness to Christ before the world," he told pilgrims, many of whom had travelled from around the world to be in Sydney for the WYD. (Varied News Sources)
Pope Benedict XVI urged hundreds of thousands of young Catholics this morning to beat back a "spiritual desert" spreading through the modern world as he closed the World Youth Day in Australia. The Pope celebrated an open-air mass in Sydney that drew some 250,000 people, mostly youngsters, in the climax of a week of prayer and pop concerts. The Pope flew by helicopter over many thousands of pilgrims, many of whom had camped out in cold weather at Sydney's Randwick Racecourse in preparation for Sunday's events. In the closing mass of the WYD, the Pope said the worshippers' youthful energy helped reinvigorate the church and urged them to become "messengers of love" to counter a world that was increasingly spiritually barren. "The world needs this renewal," he said. "In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading, an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair." Pope Benedict XVI, who has repeatedly railed against consume
rism and greed through the week, said that God was asking young people to be "prophets for a new age" in which "hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deadens our souls and poisons our relationships". Bidding "arrivederci" to the massive crowd at Royal Randwick Racecourse, the Pope announced that the next World Youth Day would be held in Madrid in 2011. "Until then, let us continue to pray for one another and let us joyfully bear witness to Christ before the world," he told pilgrims, many of whom had travelled from around the world to be in Sydney for the WYD. (Varied News Sources)