KEY POINTS:
Seventeen days and counting. What will you be doing on July 15?
Peripatetic Catholics among you will have arrived in Sydney, ready to kick off a week of religious celebration which marks the first visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Australia for World Youth Day.
The youth day
tag is a bit of a misnomer actually. Really what's planned here is a giant religious hooley running from Tuesday to Sunday. The action will peak when the Pope touches down in Oz on July 17.
Sydneysiders are braced for a programme of activities that includes not only the obligatory papal motorcade, but a boat-a-cade as well, involving a flotilla of vessels on the harbour. Fair call. Why should the spiritual leader of millions of Catholics miss out on the full tourist experience of one of the most beautiful waterfronts in the world?
No word yet on whether he and the College of Cardinals have had much luck finding anywhere to eat; even Simon Peter may have trouble swinging a Thursday night table for six at Tetsuya.
Already officials are calling it "Super Thursday" and warning residents to avoid the CBD wherever possible throughout the day, and on into the weekend - 132,671 pilgrims are already registered for World Youth Day; organisers say they expect at least 225,000 to have signed up before the event kicks off.
Australians wanting a glimpse of the man they call "God's Rottweiler" are being warned that, unless they register, they might miss out.
And all of this for a Pope "nobody likes", according to my devoutly Catholic mother.
This influx of the faithful into Sydney is an example of one of the oldest and best-loved demonstrations of religious faith - the pilgrimage.
Pilgrimages are common to all of the major faiths and the annals of Christianity are littered with accounts of them. Some, of course, went off better than others.
There were the Crusades, which as well as ridding the Holy Land of the blasted infidel, gave generations of nobility in the Middle Ages a welcome break from the filth and boredom of the daily medieval grind.
A few hundred centuries later, reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary sent hordes of Catholics flocking to Lourdes in France.
Likewise the somewhat inhospitable path of the Santiago de Compostela in Spain has been trodden by hundreds of generations of pilgrims, from the humble supplicants of early Christianity, to more sophisticated penitents of the likes of drama critic Kenneth Tynan, who was reportedly revived on the last leg of the journey by regular infusions of bottled oxygen and cigarettes.
Pilgrimage in the 21st century is a sophisticated operation. The rest of the Church might be failing miserably to get with the programme, but World Youth Day is most definitely down with the kids.
Prospective travellers log on to the colourful WYD website, festooned with images of photogenic young Catholics from all over the world, and a kicky scriptural headline, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses" (Acts 1, 8), the theme of the event.
From there, you register as cleric, media or plain old pilgrim. In a nice touch of branding, the system is called Egeria, in honour of the first pilgrim, a nun who took four years to travel from her native France to the Holy Land. What Egeria would make of the Sydney deal - two days for A$175, all travel, meals and Masses included - is anyone's guess.
A quick trawl around the "pilgrim offers" page reveals a plethora of bargains for the canny mendicant. Telstra is named as WYD's official telecommunications partner.
Pilgrims can commemorate their weekend with a range of souvenir baseball caps and stamps.
It's a slickly marketed package, targeted squarely at young Catholics with money to spend. It's not a new idea; from the moment some bright spark first flogged a cut-price palm to one of the followers who lined Christ's route to Jerusalem, believers have always been an easy market. The road to heaven might be paved with good intentions, but it's a wonder we can see them at all for the billboards along the way.
