The pope has finally arrived in Australia and will be leading proceeding's during the world youth day celebrations. But as with every big religious event, controversy follows, mainly on the responsibility of the catholic church for sexual abusing priests, and the strong laws enacted by state government to prevent protest and disruption of events.

Should the pope apologies for the actions of wayward priests? a statement of sympathy is good, but is the whole church organization responsible for the actions of individual priest? or is it more of an indictment of their inability to deal with the issue even after allegations are being made?

On another matter, an anecdote of mine in regards to the pilgrimage of the World Youth Day cross and Icon. I was not able to go to the main Sydney event but the cross and icon did come through my town of Perth, and because I go to a catholic university, we were invited to carry the cross and icon from the local suburban town centre to our uni, a walk of about a 750 meters.

Now I expect that the Catholic church, with its massive resources and planning, would be ready for any eventuality, but when we received the Icon, we found out that the two carrying bars were broken so we were forced to carry it by directly holding on to the frame. Now this thing is heavy, and normally requires 4 people to comfortably carry it because the icon itself is mounted in a large, bulky protective casing and wooden frame. The frame itself was not designed to be held directly, and the edges of the frame were not sanded down, making it very painful to carry down the street. You wont find any pictures of this leg as all of us were quite unfit and made a pathetic sight carrying this bloody heavy thing back to our student hall.

When we got to uni, it was late in the afternoon and most of the place was locked up, and only one door of the double door was open, so we had to unbolt the icon from the frame, squeeze it through, and man handle the frame sidewards through the door. The cross was no easier as most of the crowd were small high school students or elderly locals, and it was up to the uni students (not many of us) to get it through sidewards.

Because our student guild is so poor (students don't pay guild membership fees at our uni), we asked the pilgrims to make a gold coin donation for the BBQ we provided while university admin staff were not around.

Just though I would share a small part of this global religious pilgramage that would probably not make the major news services...