Sydney - A re-enactment Friday of Jesus Christ's final hours struck a serious, even morbid note for 225,000 Catholic youngsters in Sydney for a weeklong 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 life-changing experience for pilgrims drawn from more than 170 countries.
It's a series of tableaux that begins with Jesus' Last Supper with his disciples and ends with Christ's body being taken down from the cross after his crucifixion.
Organizers said the peripatetic three-hour performance, played out against the backdrop of the Opera House, the bridge and other city icons, drew a worldwide television audience above 1 billion.
A cast of 100 remained mute through choreographed events led by 27-year-old Alfio Stuto, a novice actor who played Jesus.
"It's a little bit daunting and I'm nervous, but I just stay focused," Stuto said before the first tableau at St Mary's Cathedral, which was 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."
Before the opening at St Mary's, where the pontiff is to stay before leaving Australia Monday, the leader of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics had lunch with a dozen pilgrims, including a gobsmacked Ijeoma Jacinta Igwe of Nigeria.
"I believe this is the kind of opportunity every other human being would like to have," the 25-year-old told Australia's AAP news agency. "I'm filled with joy. I'll tell you I have seen Christ. Seeing him, I have seen Christ."
The grisly scenes that end the Stations of the Cross played out at the former container terminal where the German-born pope met his flock Thursday.
In images that flashed across the world, the pope boarded a boat that skirted the Opera House and ducked under the Harbour Bridge before a grand entrance and an opening homily.
He stuck to themes that have become familiar in his three-year papacy, railing against wickedness in the modern world, the encroachments of materialism, the march of secularism and the mockery that is often the lot of the faithful.
"Life is not just a succession of events or experiences - helpful though many of them are," the pontiff said. "It's a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. 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 an open-air papal Mass. The pilgrims will trudge the 10-kilometre route to Randwick Racecourse on Saturday and sleep under the stars before the pontiff arrives with the warming winter sunshine.
