Pope to visit Germany for World Youth Day

The crowd will be the same but the star on the stage will be different. Pope Benedict begins his first international trip on Thursday and everyone will be watching his every move.

The 78-year-old German goes to Cologne in his homeland for four days to conclude the Church's World Youth Day, a sort of Catholic Woodstock that takes place in a different city in the world every few years.

But this one will be different. It will be the first without the man who founded the event that draws hundreds of thousands of Catholic youth from the around the globe - Pope John Paul II.

While he seems to have shed some stage fright since his election four months ago, Pope Benedict is clearly not as comfortable with the limelight as was John Paul, a former actor who relished a chance to bring a crowd of millions to its feet.

"Every Pope has his own personality and one should not expect a copy of Pope John Paul," Germany's senior cardinal, Karl Lehmann of Mainz, said in an interview.

"But nor would Pope Benedict attempt to replicate him."

Still, while Pope Benedict knows he can never mesmerise young people the way his predecessor did, he will have to build on Pope John Paul's attempts to draw more of them back to a Church diminished by dwindling attendance figures.

According to statistics from the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, the number of Christians in Western Europe will continue to fall in the next two decades while Islam will grow.

Pope Benedict was quoted as telling Vatican Radio in an interview to be broadcast ahead of the trip that he hoped it would provide a "new impulse" for the Church in Europe.

Some 800,000 young people are expected to attend the culminating event of World Youth Day on Sunday, when the Pope celebrates Mass on an open field.

"He has his own qualities and I think he is able to speak to young people in a very convincing, engaging way," Cardinal Lehmann said.

Pope Benedict expressed concern about the future of mainstream Christian Churches in a talk to priests in July.

"The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying," he said, adding that the Western world seemed to be "tired of its own culture, a world where there's no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ".

According to a recent Vatican report, participation at Sunday Mass in some developed countries is as low as five per cent.

The fact that the Pope's first trip aboard will be to his homeland came by chance rather than choice. The World Youth Day venue was chosen years before his election and was to have been presided over by John Paul.

He will also hold meetings with Jews, Muslims, Protestants and be given a native-son greeting by political leaders.

Perhaps the key event outside the youth festival will his visit to the Cologne synagogue, making him only the second Pope since the early history of the Roman Catholic Church 2,000 years ago to visit a Jewish temple.