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As a gesture of gratitude towards the large number of callings which arise during WYD, the Holy Father will travel to San Lorenzo de El Escorial (40 kilometres from Madrid) in order to meet with the more than one thousand young nuns in the Kings’ Patio of the monastery. Afterwards, just before midday, Benedict XVI will head towards the impressive Basilica to meet with the young university professors in a gathering organised at the express request (with precedent in Regensburg, Germany, etc.), emphasising his continual desire to contribute to the reflection between science and faith.

We will of course see him this evening at the Stations of the Cross………..

..just been to our Catechesis site, listened to some great music (Steve Curtis band we think – bit like Hillsong if you know Hillsong – if you don’t, check out YouTube). We were invited to open our hearts, open our minds and open our hands, that we might serve others. Very powerful. The main speaker today was the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan. He reminded us that the last two days’ catechesis were about being firm in our faith and rooted in  Jesus Christ, and that he was privileged to talk to us today about the results, the outcome of that. We have been called to share our faith, which is the missionary, evangelisation aspect of the theme of this World Youth Day.  Faith is contagious and we should be busting to share it with others!!!

How about this for a great photo?! Wish I could say we’d taken it – it’s one of the official ones. But isn’t it great?!!!

This evening we saw the Pope! The astmosphere was amazing. Everyone felt together as one. It was very colourful seeing all the different flags. Our A&B flag was clearly distinguished from all of the rest of them as it’s so different. We love it and always look for it in the crowds. Seeing the Popemobile again brought back memories from Hyde Park last year, although this time we mostly saw him on the big screen due to the masses of people. The streets were crammed and the locals aided us in cooling down through the use of buckets of water and hoses thrown from buildings.

This morning we attended catecheis with thousands of other English speaking pilgrims. Having experienced the impressive welcoming mass in Spanish and despite enjoying immersing ourselves in the culture, it was good to be able to follow the session word for word.  Hosted by ‘Love and Life’, the charismatic Sisters of Life led us in a morning of appreciating the faith and accepting it for what it is, as well as encouraging us to remember the importance of life itself , purely for its uniqueness. Before celebrating mass, Cardinal Pel, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia added an inspiring talk focused on the debate of science vs nature. It was terrific  to attend the event, and to be able to share it with so many pilgrims from so many places, but it was also interesting to then reflect that, even though we all spoke the same language and were sharing this factor in common, we were all still going to take something different away from the experience. Instead of just being able to exchanging niceties, it was possible to really discuss the Sisters of Life’s moving testimonies and we particularly enjoyed exchanging stories of the last few days with pilgrims from the Diocese of Portsmouth and a London diocese of Canada.

The good old Vatican website and the official WYD site will have all of the homilies and major addresses from WYD as the week goes on as well as a load of other news and video.

There is also a lot of video news from around the web – like here from Rome Reports, for instance: