Archbishop of Sydney

World Youth Day

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
21 August 2005

Last week 2,500 young Australians were winding their way across the world to Germany for the World Youth Day.

World Youth Day is a Catholic celebration begun by the late Pope John Paul II and celebrated every three years.  This venue is Cologne and Pope Benedict made his first trip home since his election.  I was with 250 young workers, university students and year elevens who set out in the footsteps of St. Paul through Greece and Turkey.  They were a marvellous group, unusually good humoured, mutually supportive and most were genuinely devout.  We had Mass every day and regular prayer on the tour.

Our group plans had to be changed twice; firstly when a terrorist attack in the Turkish port of Kusadasi killed five tourists, forcing us to travel through Poland and the Czech Republic instead.

Then rough weather in the Aegean Sea forced us to cancel our trip to the island of Patmos, where the apostle John wrote the strange Book of Revelations.  As a quickly devised alternative, we entered Turkey in convoy with four guards who had a great time protecting us in two white cars.  As we travelled to ancient Ephesus for Mass next to the house of Mary and John.

After flying to Athens, we travelled by Catamaran (made in Australia), ferry and plane across the Greek islands and then 1800kms by bus to Cologne.

We had intended to follow Paul the greatest missionary in early Christianity.  We began with the public square in Athens where he preached on the unknown God with little effect.  He wrote no letters to the Athenians.  Paul did better on the public rostrum in Corinth, founding a small, lively and fractious community there.  In that forum we listened to excerpts from his letters to the Corinthians and then had 15 minutes quiet to contemplate the changes Christianity had brought to society over 2000 years since those tiny beginnings.

One highlight for me was in the Great Theatre at Ephesus, which still holds 25,000 spectators, when we heard an account from the Acts of the Apostles (one of the priests brought it up on his pocket p.c.) which the silversmiths organised against Paul who was damaging their trade in statues of the multi-breasted goddess Diana.

Poland and the Czech Republic were different again, especially Krakow and Prague which escaped the World War II bombing and are now recovering from the pollution of Communist times.

Catholic churches abounded, some of them spectacular Gothic Cathedrals dating back 800-900 years; ultimate tributes to the one good God.

At the other extreme was Auschwitz, the Nazi camp where more than one million were exterminated.  One pilgrim’s great-grand-father and grand-father, members of the Polish Resistance, had been interned there.  The older man died and his son survived weighing 40 kilos at liberation.

It makes a difference when men reject God.