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New pope reaches out to youth

In a crucial test for a pope seen by many as being out of touch with today`s youth - not to mention today`s Catholics in general - Benedict XVI took the stage on Sunday to perform mass before hundreds of thousands of young Catholics during the World Youth Day celebrations in Cologne, Germany. Whereas the late Pope John Paul II reveled in the attention of millions, working the crowd like a rock star, his successor`s reputation as a reserved and rigid defender of the faith has left many wondering whether he`ll be able to connect to the future of the Roman Catholic Church in the same way, sparking the sort of long-term commitment to the faith that the church desperately needs.

"We will have to wait see whether Pope Benedict XVI can imitate that," says Siegfried Wiedenhofer, a Frankfurt theology professor who studied under the pope when he was a theology professor in Bonn in the 1960s and remains friends with him to this day. "I would say that through his unpretentiousness and his warm personality he will be able to fulfill the role. But it`s not one in which he feels comfortable."

Pope John Paul II created World Youth Day in 1984 in an effort to reconnect the church with its future generations. Subsequent events, starting in Rome and including - among other cities - Denver and Toronto, offered the perfect stage for the charismatic pope to connect with a generation sociologists say has begun slowly losing interest in traditional institutions.

Now his successor, who arrived at the Cologne airport on Thursday morning, is hoping to continue his legacy.

"I would like to show them how beautiful it is to be Christian because the widespread idea which continues to exist is that Christianity is composed of laws and bans which one has to keep and, hence, is something toilsome and burdensome," Benedict XVI said in a Vatican radio interview before his arrival in Cologne. He said he hoped the week-long event would spark "a wave of new faith among young people - especially the youth in Germany and Europe."