VATICAN CITY (CNS) – With fewer than 100 days to go, preparations for World Youth Day 2011 in Madrid are heating up and organisers are promising a fiesta, adding a Spanish flavour to the traditional opportunities for prayer, friendship, music and religious education.
As of 7 May, organisers reported 347,965 youths had registered for the 16-21 August event, which Pope Benedict XVI will attend.
The figure included 22,488 young people from the United States and 5,439 from Canada. The Italians – always a big contingent at World Youth Day – were leading the pack with 65,196 registrants, outpacing even the Spaniards by more than 10,000. While registering has benefits – including priority seating at papal events – young people seem to know they won’t be turned away, and so an earlier estimate of 1.5 million participants seems to be right on track.
Fr Eric Jacquinet, the official in charge of the youth section at the Pontifical Council for the Laity, the official sponsor of World Youth Day, said, “We can’t predict how many will register at the last minute.”
At WYD Paris in 1997, he said, 300,000 young people pre-registered and there were 1.2 million people at the closing vigil and closing Mass with Pope John Paul II.
The staff of WYD Madrid has rallied interest and is helping prepare all those young people with a major presence on the Internet, especially through social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Photos of the preparation phase are posted on Flickr and videos produced by or about WYD 2011 are collected on a special YouTube channel.Organisers announced on 10 May that the Madrid event will be the first WYD with its own radio station and with a web-TV site. More than 30,000 people applied to be volunteers at WYD and the staff is still sifting through the applications to settle on 22,400 volunteers. As of 12 May, she said, the WYD staff was 500 strong, and 80 per cent of those workers were volunteers.
The first three afternoons, evenings and nights – “evening” in Madrid would be considered “night” in many other parts of the world – have been set aside for cultural activities, including the music and museum visits.
The mornings will be dedicated to religious education sessions, which take place in hundreds of locations and in dozens of languages. The teachers of the sessions are 250 Bishops, who almost always leave plenty of time to dialogue with the youths. The pontifical council chooses the 250 Bishops, usually based on those who have told the council they will attend WYD and are available. The final choice, he said, is based on language and country of origin – “for example, we want to make sure the German speakers come not only from Germany, but also from Austria and Switzerland.”