Youth gather for 'Catholic Woodstock'

When Pope Benedict XVI takes the stage on Sunday to perform mass before hundreds of thousands of young Catholics in the culmination of World Youth Day celebrations in Cologne, he's likely to feel a little out of his element.

Whereas Pope John Paul II reveled in the attention of millions, working the crowd like a rock star, his successor's reputation as a reserved and rigid defender of the faith has left many wondering whether he'll be able to connect to the future of the Roman Catholic Church in the same way, sparking the sort of long-term commitment to the faith that the church desperately needs.

"We will have to wait see whether Pope Benedict XVI can imitate that," says Siegfried Wiedenhofer, a Frankfurt theology professor who studied under the pope when he was a theology professor in Bonn in the 1960s and remains friends with him to this day. "I would say that through his unpretentiousness and his warm personality he will be able to fulfill the role. But it's not one in which he feels comfortable."

Pope John Paul II created World Youth Day in 1984 in an effort to reconnect the church with its future generations. Subsequent events, starting in Rome and including - among other cities - Denver and Toronto, offered the perfect stage for the charismatic pope to connect with a generation sociologists say has begun slowly losing interest in traditional institutions.

Now his successor, who arrived at the Cologne airport on Thursday morning, is hoping to continue his legacy.

"I would like to show them how beautiful it is to be Christian because the widespread idea which continues to exist is that Christianity is composed of laws and bans which one has to keep and, hence, is something toilsome and burdensome," he said in a Vatican radio interview before his arrival in Cologne. He hoped the week-long event would spark "a wave of new faith among young people - especially the youth in Germany and Europe."

Sociologists and religious scholars say the gap between spirituality and the institution of the church has never been greater. The number of people attending mass has dropped significantly across most of Western Europe and the United States since 1980. Though young people are even more spiritual than their parents or grandparents were, they are proving tough to lock into Catholicism longterm, according to Grace Davie, a religion and sociology professor at the University of Exeter, in England.

"There's an openness to spirituality among young people," says Ms. Davie. "You see that in the readiness to do these one-off things, like in Cologne. They like being together, but they just don't want a week-by-week commitment."

Indeed, Cologne is already drawing the throngs that has made World Youth Day the largest regular gathering of Catholics in the world. The city is awash in young people and colorful banners and flags identifying their country of origin. By Sunday, organizers forecast that up to a million people from around 200 nations will have arrived for the "Catholic Woodstock." Youth Day candles, but also flip-flops, are on sale, as is a cellphone ring version of the Youth Day song "Venimus adorare eum." Posters are plastered in storefronts advertising "After-Prayer" parties.

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