Sydney - A re-enactment Friday of Jesus Christ's final hours struck a serious, even mordant note for 225,000 Catholic youngsters in Sydney for a week-long love-in with Pope Benedict XVI. Cardinal George Pell, the leader of Australia's 5 million Catholics and the pope's host during the World Youth Day celebrations, said the Stations of the Cross was "one of the greatest teaching moments" and a potentially a life-changing experience for pilgrims drawn from over 170 countries.
It's a series of tableaux that begins with the Last Supper that Jesus had with his disciples and ends with the body being taken down from the cross after his torture and crucifixion.
The three-hour re-enactment, played out against the backdrop of the Opera House and other icons of the harbour city, is expected to capture a worldwide audience above 1 billion.
A cast of 100 who remain mute throughout the pageant is lead by 27-year-old Alfio Stuto, who plays Jesus.
"It's a little bit daunting and I am nervous but I just stay focused," Stuto said before the first tableau, witnessed by the 81-year-old pontiff. "I mean, this is huge in the sense that people can connect and we can touch people's hearts."
The closing scenes play out at the former container terminal where the German-born pope met his flock on Thursday. In television footage that flashed across the world, the pope made a grand entrance aboard a boat that skirted the Opera House and other famous landmarks.
Awaiting him, and agog for his first words to them, was a congregation estimated at 150,000. He stuck to familiar themes, railing against wickedness in the modern world, the encroachments of materialism, the march of secularism and the mockery that the faithful often have to put up with.
"Life is not just a succession of events or experiences - helpful though many of them are - it's a search for the true, the good and the beautiful," the German-born pope said. "Don't be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty subverts beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth."
World Youth Day, held somewhere in the world every three years, reaches its climax on Sunday with a papal Mass at a racecourse in the city. The pilgrims will trudge the 10-kilometre route on Saturday and sleep out under the stars before the pontiff arrives with the warming winter sunshine.
