By Sid Astbury. New South Wales, Australia, 09:00 AM IST

At Australian funerals these days mourners are more likely to hear the pop song 'Stairway to Heaven' than the hymn 'Abide with Me'.

Only two picks from the hymnbook made it into a top 10 compiled in July by leading Adelaide funeral service company Centennial Park.

The switch from 'Amazing Grace' to 'My Way' is symptomatic of a godlessness that Pope Benedict XVI, who visits Sydney next week for the World Youth Day celebrations, hopes to reverse.

His message to the hundreds of thousands of youngsters coming to share mass with him is that they should 'go against the tide' and 'not be afraid of seeming different and being criticized for what might seem to be losing or out of fashion'.

Around a quarter of the 21 million Australians say they are Catholics, but only 14 percent are regular churchgoers. The next biggest Christian denomination is the 4-million strong Anglican Church, but it, too, is hard pressed to retain numbers.

As elsewhere in the developed world, the established Christian church is losing ground to evangelical movements. Sydney's Hillsong Church can fill sports stadiums and gather 20,000 for a Sunday service. It's even expanded to London, Cape Town and Kiev.

Archbishop of Sydney Cardinal George Pell, a personal friend of the pope, sees the July 15-20 gathering of young Catholics as a marvellous chance to claw back congregations and present his faith as modern and full of life.

As well as rosary beads and catechisms, the backpacks prepared for pilgrims contain vouchers for McDonald's and a tattoo transfer.

There are football shirts with Benedetto 16 on the back and I Love Jesus T-shirts for sale as official merchandise.

A German heavy metal band is coming and altogether there will be 114 hours of performances. There will also be the opportunity for 14 hours of confession of sins - something that trendy Catholics now call the sacrament of reconciliation.

'This is an opportunity for young people to explore the values in which they want to live their lives,' said World Youth Day chief executive Danny Casey. 'It's a rebuilding of the social capital, providing a forum for people to explore their values.'

The event, begun 20 years ago and billed as the biggest meeting place for young people on the planet, was last held in Cologne, Germany, in 2005.

Its proponents say it has no equivalent in any other religion and has achieved the status of a sort of World Cup for Catholics.

'It does address a problem of giving young people an entree into an adult Catholic world and it seems to me to give some type of answers to the questions of why be religious, why be Catholic,' Australian Catholic academic Richard Rymarz told The Sydney Morning Herald. 'World Youth Day gives a taste of a much broader Catholicism and it allows young Catholics a strong, affective experience.'

Catholicism in Australia is in need of the vigour of youth. Only one in three of the men, who enrol in seminaries to train as priests, stay the course and go on to ordination.

'It's more realistic to talk about the dying of the clergy than the ageing or greying of the clergy,' Melbourne priest Eric Hodgens wrote in a report on the recruitment crisis.

One benefit that Cardinal Pell is expecting is a rush for the priesthood. 'I would be surprised if we don't have a bit of a bounce for at least a couple of years afterwards in the numbers of young men coming into the priesthood and your women wanting to devote themselves to the Catholic Church and even things like the number of young Catholics who want to become Catholic teachers,' he said.

The highlight of the 81-year-old German pontiff's overseas trip, his third this year, will be an open-air mass that organizers say will be the largest gathering ever in Australia with 500,000 in attendance.

But perhaps the most important image, and one that will flash across television screens around the world, will be Benedict's pope-a-cade arrival on Sydney Harbour July 17.

By Sid Astbury (Staff Writer, © IANS)