At Saturday's Vigil celebration in Sydney, Pope Benedict offered the young people another wonderful wedding of the personal, the pastoral, and the theological:

The Holy Spirit has been in some ways the neglected person of the Blessed Trinity. A clear understanding of the Spirit almost seems beyond our reach. Yet, when I was a small boy, my parents, like yours, taught me the Sign of the Cross. So, I soon came to realize that there is one God in three Persons, and that the Trinity is the centre of our Christian faith and life. While I grew up to have some understanding of God the Father and the Son the names already conveyed much my understanding of the third person of the Trinity remained incomplete. So, as a young priest teaching theology, I decided to study the outstanding witnesses to the Spirit in the Churchs history. It was on this journey that I found myself reading, among others, the great Saint Augustine.Augustines understanding of the Holy Spirit evolved gradually; it was a struggle. As a young man he had followed Manichaeism - one of those attempts I mentioned earlier, to create a spiritual utopia by radically separating the things of the spirit from the things of the flesh. Hence he was at first suspicious of the Christian teaching that God had become man. Yet his experience of the love of God present in the Church led him to investigate its source in the life of the Triune God. This led him to three particular insights about the Holy Spirit as the bond of unity within the Blessed Trinity: unity as communion, unity as abiding love, and unity as giving and gift. These three insights are not just theoretical. They help explain how the Spirit works. In a world where both individuals and communities often suffer from an absence of unity or cohesion, these insights help us remain attuned to the Spirit and to extend and clarify the scope of our witness.

The entire homily makes a fine preparation for Sunday's reading from Romans 8.At tomorrow's climatic Eucharist the Pope will confirm twenty-four young people. One awaits the homily with anticipation.Rocco Palmo provides extensive coverage of World Youth Day events, including links to yesterday's remarkable re-enactment of the Way of the Cross in the public places of the secular metropolis.