For those who had been to previous World Youth Days in Rome, Manila, Toronto and Cologne, the unqualified success of Sydney's turn was no surprise. The joy and sweetness of thousands of young Catholic pilgrims who flooded into the city, in the words of Cardinal George Pell, simply "overwhelmed" the rancid negativity of sections of our sex-fixated media, and those aggressive secularists who regard religion as an irrational threat to their way of living.
In the end, pilgrims from across the globe melted a cynical city's heart, from the bus drivers who finished their shifts and then took it on themselves to ferry home nuns and others they spotted stranded near Central station one cold night, to the suburban families who spontaneously offered their showers to visitors camping in local schools.
Catholic or not, most people want love and goodness in their lives and the contrast between the radiant faces of the pilgrims and the strained masks of their most strident condom-waving detractors was striking. Beauty was not just in the eye of the beholder.
For many Sydneysiders, even jaded priests, it showcased a new generation of young people who shocked them with their social conservatism. This wasn't the fabled youth of binge drinking, drug abuse and rampant sexually transmitted diseases, but a group of gregarious, sophisticated people unashamedly embracing the 21st-century revival in orthodox religious faith.
The genius of a World Youth Day is to tap into the desire of a technologically connected global generation for mass human interaction.
"Youth in every corner of Australia are working and trying to build up their faith," said Annaliese Wursthorn, 25, a speech pathologist from Melbourne who spent the last six months travelling around the country with the World Youth Day cross. "But when you begin to realise you're not the only one [searching for answers] it fills you with such excitement and such reassurance you can come out and be a bit more open about your faith."
Of her first World Youth Day, in Rome, when she was 17, Wursthorn recalls: "I was so surprised by how many other Catholics from my own city were there. I had been worried the church was dying because so many people tell you it is, but it isn't."
For anyone despairing that the nihilism of Big Brother and Dolly magazine represents Australian youth, World Youth Day was the antidote. "It was so wonderful as a young person to show people we're not all like that. We're just working hard to be good people and trying to be the best we can be," Wursthorn said.
Cath Smibert, 28, who worked for Vatican media in Rome for seven years before returning this year to hometown Sydney, says World Youth Day is proof that "young people are rebelling against relativity and nothingness, and are excited about a voice that is consistent and proven over generations, and which cares enough about them to be consistent".
The World Youth Day generation, as the national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has described it, "is united by a consciousness fundamentally different from that of the 1968 generation and their children". It is rebelling against the do-whatever-you-want culture spawned by the 1960s social revolution. It has experienced first hand the consequences of the four-decade-long experimentation with false freedom, the broken marriages and damaged children, and a sense that there are many truths and no immutable moral rules.
In a world of moral relativism, the World Youth Day generation hungers for certainty and absolute truths, the stock in trade of Pope Benedict XVI.
"Life … is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful," he told the pilgrims at the Hungry Mile last week. "It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom."
While pantheistic followers of Al Gore were heartened by what they saw as the Pope's nod to environmentalism, and played up a pretend rift between him and Cardinal George Pell on climate change, the Pope's message was more crafty. If we are concerned about the poisoning of the natural environment, so we should be "equally alert" to the poisoning of the social environment, he said; to "the signs of turning our back on the moral structure with which God has endowed humanity".
We should be alert to "a poison which threatens to corrode what is good, reshape who we are, and distort the purpose for which we have been created".
He cited alcohol and drug abuse, violence and sexual degradation, "often presented through television and the internet as entertainment", and finally, abortion: "How can it be that the most wondrous and sacred human space - the womb - has become a place of unutterable violence?"
More popular concerns with which the secular and religious worlds find agreement, the Pope said - such as non-violence, sustainable development, justice and peace, and care for our environment - "are of vital importance for humanity. They cannot, however, be understood apart from a profound reflection upon the innate dignity of every human life from conception to natural death."
These more difficult and controversial battles are those which the new World Youth Day generation is showing itself willing to take on.
I watched a lot of the festivities from Rome, revelling in the cultural treasures and iconography that make the modern irreligious city a mecca for pilgrims of the tourist kind. In the Pope's home, admiring Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, I was reminded by our young tour guide, Paul Encinias, an American doctoral student with degrees in archeology, art history and philosophy, of the Renaissance attitude to beauty as an absolute concept, able to be defined mathematically as expressly as it is in nature, where the "golden ratio" is present in the spacing of flower petals as much as it is in the symmetry of a marble statue or da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.
Living in an era when faith and reason, art and mathematics, were inextricably linked, Renaissance artists would regard modern relativistic notions of beauty as ludicrous.
The idea there is no absolute beauty or absolute truth was as alien to the devout 23-year-old genius who carved the Pieta and later painted the roof of the Sistine Chapel, as we hope it is to the new World Youth Day generation.
