Sydney - Catholic youngsters making the pilgrimage to Australia to be with Pope Benedict XVI for the weeklong World Youth Day celebrations in Sydney were condemned Wednesday as godless fun seekers led astray by an 81-year-old troubadour. 

"It's become an occasion for a very secular approach to religion," breakaway Canberra cleric Father Peter Scott complained. "It's become just a happy party - a week of parties and concerts and worldly activities with very little of anything that's truly holy and sacred and prayerful or that's profoundly Catholic for that matter." 

Scott, head of the Holy Cross Seminary, pilloried the German-born pope, who is to make his grand entrance for the festival Thursday, for his "liberal, easy-going, secular, unsacred" ways. 

But Scott's voice was drowned out by the raptures of those in town for festivities that culminate Sunday with an open-air papal Mass for a projected congregation of 500,000. 

World Youth Day, held somewhere in the world every three years, has become a powerful magnet for young believers who morph into young revellers after the day's devotions are done. 

Around 125,000 have arrived from abroad to join the 100,000 young Australian Catholics registered to attend Australia's biggest event since the 2000 Olympics. The lucky ones are billeted in cosy Sydney homes, but most are camped in school classrooms. There are even 20,000 sleeping on concrete floors in the sports stadiums used for the Olympics. 

The pope flew in Sunday for three days of rest at a forest retreat outside the city. He is to transfer to lodgings in the heart of the city, ready for what's been dubbed Super Thursday, when he takes to Sydney Harbour for the start of his official duties. 

The harbour's iconic bridge and the shell-roofed Opera House are to form the picture-perfect backdrop to the papal flotilla. Organizers expected 150,000 to be on the foreshore to greet the Holy Father. 

The austere Scott could point to plenty of evidence that Sydney had turned into party central for the Catholic youth from more than 170 countries. 

"We started with eight or so people dancing and then it just got bigger and bigger," local pilgrim Dustin O'Hara told the Daily Telegraph newspaper while he waltzed up a Sydney boulevard closed to cars for the Catholic jubilee. 

Sunset worshippers turned into late-night revelers at the close of Tuesday's opening Mass. After the 400 bishops and 26 cardinals vacated the 200-metre stage set up on the foreshore, the venue was given over to a rock concert and fireworks display that went well into the night. 

"We stayed to party and got home pretty late," confessed Melissa Jackson, an 18-year-old pilgrim from the US city of Boston, "but it didn't matter because we're in a downtown hotel and we don't have catechism until the afternoon." (dpa)