From a Vatican Radio podcast yesterday:
In one week’s time, events leading to World Youth Day 2008 will be launched in Sydney, Australia. James Francis Cardinal Stafford, Major Penitentiary of the Catholic Church, spoke to us ahead of next week’s gathering dedicated to Catholic young:
Everywhere that I’ve gone as President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity since 1996 and now as Major Penitentiary of the Church, I have met young people who have been at World Youth Days, many of them in Denver, and their lives have been profoundly affected. I remember once reading about a young man from Canada — a Canadian University in Toronto. He said to the professor, a young woman who has shepherding them, “The Beatles never wept over me.” She said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I saw John Paul… weeping in joy in Denver Stadium over the fact that I was there together with 100,000 other of my brothers and sisters, and bishops included.” They have experienced — in John Paul II and now in Benedict — a man who trusts them, a man who loves them and who is willing to give himself to them in trust, in their freedom, and they haven’t experienced that very often from adults.