Spanish journalist: “young people should go to Cologne to pay homage to John Paul II”

Vatican City, Apr 14, 2005 / 22:00 pm

The renowned Spanish journalist Paloma Gomez Borrero, the only female journalist who accompanied the Pope during all 104 of his apostolic trips around the world, said Thursday that young people from all of the continents should attend World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, in August.

In an interview with CNA, Gomez Borrero, author of the best-seller in Spanish, “El Papa Amigo” (“The Pope Friend”), noted the magnetism of Pope John Paul II with young people; she said the World Youth Day that most impacted her was that of Denver in 1993.

“What happened in Denver was completely unexpected,” she said.

“That hundreds of thousands of young people in a country with no tradition of pilgrimages, in a city with a Catholic minority, would mobilize themselves to meet with the Pope, to listen to him and follow him took the world by surprise,” she added.

“The mark left by the Holy Father in Denver was as important and unexpected as that of the World Youth Day in Paris, where “a secularized Paris expected some 200,000 young people from Europe to attend, and instead more than a million came,” Gomez Borrero noted.

“I want to especially call on all young people of the world to attend World Youth Day in Cologne, because Karol Wojtila will be present there more than ever, and they must respond to the call of the one who gave so much for young people,” she said.

Young people need to remember that they are not John Paul II’s kids, but rather, the Pope’s kids, “and this means they follow the call of whoever the Successor of Peter is,” she concluded.