As part of my work at school, I was able to accompany a group of thirty-five sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys to World Youth Day in Sydney, in July 2008. World Youth Day, held every so often in a different part of the world, is a huge week-long festival that culminates in a visit from the Pope. In the buildup to the one in Sydney, there were concerns that it could be the smallest World Youth Day ever because maybe only a quarter of a million people might turn up, especially given the impact high fuel prices were having on airfares. I wasn’t worried. A quarter of a million sounded like plenty to me. I don’t much like crowds, and besides, having been a Catholic priest, I have a complex relationship with the church authorities who would be appearing in all their finery. I find it hard to believe that Jesus died naked on the cross so that the rest of us could have a fancy-dress party. I wasn’t looking forward to World Youth Day.

The boys from school rescued me from getting too tangled up inside myself. The Pope seemed like a pleasant old gentleman who was quite capable of enjoying himself. I had started to think more warmly of him from the moment he took the same name as we had given our Benedict; I imagined we must have had more in common than I realized. Every time he spoke in Sydney, I found, despite myself, that I was wholly caught up with the simple depth and elegance of what he said. He named things that were important to me.

Quite apart from that, it soon became obvious that the crowd, which ended up closer to 400,000, was really the best part. While there were dozens of cardinals and bishops way off in the distance, all solemnly dressed up and doing as much as any mardi gras to support the dry cleaners of the world, there were thousands of young people much closer to us. The kids had the time of their lives. Their godly joy was infectious. It budged the cranky heart of their middle-aged teacher.

Of course there were hassles. We traveled by bus, and upon arrival at the school where we were booked to stay, we found that the organizers had thought it would be fun to send us and our bags to two different places. Deprived of my breathing machine, I went downstairs that night and curled up beside the photocopier in the staff room. To my surprise, there were times when I had slept worse in my own bed.

It takes all types to make a religion, and the week before the Pope arrived was a spirited one, culminating in a 6-mile walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Randwick Racecourse, where the Pope would be saying Mass the following morning. The bridge is closed on rare occasions; the time before this was for a walk for reconciliation between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians in 2000. The prospect of getting across it without having to pay the toll was too good to miss. Along the way, I thought of my mother who, as a wide-eyed little girl holding the hand of her mother, had walked across the bridge on the day it was opened in 1932. She had walked across it again for its golden jubilee in 1982. These days, Mum wasn’t walking far.

I rang her from the bridge; she was in bed watching on TV, annoyed that the Pope was a smoker but pleased that he liked cats. I also called Jenny to reminisce about a time before we were married when we had also walked across the bridge on a blustery day and we were the only people crazy enough to do it. She had her hands full looking after six young people at that moment, our own and three cousins. Her present moment was too full to share with the past.

Along the way, onlookers joined the festive atmosphere. A boy wore a T-shirt that read I MAY LIVE IN MY OWN LITTLE WORLD BUT AT LEAST I KNOW EVERYBODY HERE. Workers on a building site made a cross out of iron pipes and hammed it up for the crowds, which were more appreciative of irony than I had imagined they would be. Pilgrims are people looking for signs. Somebody stood on the wayside with a placard reading this is not a sign.

That night, 200,000 people slept in the open air at the racecourse. To be honest, not all of them slept, at least not until well after bedtime. But by the time I got out of my sleeping bag at 5:10 AM to beat the line for the toilets—facilities whose condition reminded us that even spiritual gatherings have their physical dimensions— the whole crowd had settled. I began to walk around the outer track of the course.

Everybody had been given a shiny thermal blanket to sleep under. These looked like large sheets of aluminium foil and were probably more useful for cooking than a serious attempt on Everest. But most people were using them on this crisp, clear night, and at 5:10 AM, the full moon reflected light onto the peaks and troughs of all these shiny blankets as if they were a sea. I kept walking. There were 200,000 people here, but I had the place to myself. The stillness of the sleeping crowd was one of the most serene and beautiful things I had ever seen. The moon played with the shapes made by the thermal blankets. It was a prayer without words. I thought of the same moon shining on hundreds of thousands of refugees sleeping in a camp on the Sudan border and wondered about life’s lottery. I hoped that this sleeping gathering might help to change the odds.

Before long, Jenny rang. She had had a choppy night. There were six young things in the house, three of them homesick and the other three sick of home. We talked until we were ready to laugh about it. We decided that six people can trouble more sleep than 200,000.