A scene from the World Youth Day 2008 celebration

Outside the world-renowned Sydney Opera House in Australia is brimmed with the exuberance of the World Youth Day delegates from 160 countries. The atmosphere seems more like an open air grand party than a liturgy. Everyone is on a spiritual high.

But did you know that the Philippines holds the current record for the largest attendance to the World Youth Day events? The World Youth Day event that was held in Manila in 1995 recorded four million attendees. The seat of the Catholic church, the city of Rome, is a distant second with merely two million attendees.