Given the theme of his pastoral visit, “Christ Our Hope”, Pope Benedict XVI delivered, as expected, a message of encouragement to the American Church. And it was the youth he singled out, time and again, for special attention.

Much has been made of Pope Benedict’s understated public style, as people compare him with his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who was so clearly at ease with crowds. But Pope Benedict has a magnetism all his own.

At his weekly audiences, he consistently draws crowds as large as, or larger than those of John Paul II. His particular brand of charisma was evident in Pope Benedict’s meeting with some 25,000 youth at St Joseph’s Seminary, in New York.

Joseph Ratzinger has shown a profound regard for the youth over the three years since his election to the papacy. Some had wondered whether he would continue the tradition of presiding over the World Youth Days, the largest event for youth in the world.

But he has clearly embraced them. In mid-July he will journey to Australia for the 23rd World Youth Day – his second such pilgrimage. In 2006, he made his first papal pilgrimage outside Italy to attend the event in his homeland, Germany.

Addressing the cheering youth on the sprawling grounds outside the American seminary, Pope Benedict called to mind his own teenage years “marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers”.

The dangers that young people face today are not like the ones that confronted the Pope in his youth, but here was a man very much in touch with their difficulties and the present dangers, one who believed in them and wanted them to know that. He called them to recognise their role in shaping the future and in bringing good out of evil situations.

Truth is a person: Jesus Christ

The stories of substance abuse, poverty, violence, degradation of girls and women which arose from a “poisoned attitude of mind” and a “callousness of heart” that ignored and then ridiculed “the God-given dignity of every human being” could all have been different, said Pope Benedict. “Such tragedies point to what might have been and what could be, were there other hands – your hands – reaching out.”

At no point in his address could the Pope be heard talking down to misguided youth. Here was a father speaking words of wisdom to children that he loved, a friend chatting with companions of whom he was deeply fond.

“Have you noticed,” he asked at one point, “how often the call for freedom is made without ever referring to the truth of the human person?” But Pope Benedict remains the teacher. Turning to the subject of truth and its absence, he said, “an idea has spread which, in giving value to everything indiscriminately, claims to assure freedom and to liberate conscience.

This we call relativism” – a constant theme in the Pope’s writings. He also shared on contemplation, liturgy, the Paschal Mystery and about freedom itself, which he described as “a delicate value”.

The challenge that Pope Benedict lays down to young people is not obscure.  The challenge is to be like Christ, to follow Christ. “Ultimately truth is a person: Jesus Christ,” he told the youth. “Strive for a pattern of life truly marked by charity, chastity and humility, in imitation of Christ, the Eternal High Priest.”

He never loses the opportunity to propose Christ, to give “the reason for the hope” (1 Peter 3:15). Two days before, at the United Nations, he drew upon his recent encyclical Spes Salvi, noting that, “every generation has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs”.

And he added: “For Christians, this task is motivated by the hope drawn from the saving work of Jesus Christ.”