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Last year's World Youth Day attracted some 223,000 pilgrims.

It has been one year since some 223,000 registered pilgrims from 170 countries converged on Sydney, Australia for World Youth Day 2008.

The World Youth Day anniversary Mass will be streamed live at 6:30 p.m. July 20 from St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney (where the World Youth Day countdown clock rung in the start of festivities). Don’t forget the 17-hour time difference, so if anyone is bored at 1:30 a.m. Sunday, join in the Mass online.

If you’d like to take a trip down memory lane, here are some options:

• Skim through our World Youth Day blogposts
• Watch two videos posted earlier this year by pilgrims from Sacred Heart Parish in Prescott (be forewarned: they played choppy for me)
• Play through a musical slide show of photos from Our Lady of Mount Carmel pilgrims (Brisbane photos come first)
• Read the wrap up story about the 17-day pilgrimage

Jackie Brillas, a young adult from St. Bernadette Parish in Scottsdale, was so impacted by her Australian experience, that she moved there shortly afterward. No specific word on how the year has gone.

Bill Marcotte, coordinator of youth and young adult evangelization for the Phoenix Diocese, is already looking ahead to World Youth Day 2011 in Madrid, Spain. He’s headed there in September to get a lay of the land and scope out the next spot for the Days in the Diocese conference immediately preceding World Youth Day.

As for me, my time in Australia has haunted me quite regularly since last July. I struggle with my failures to bring you more of the journey on this blog such as:

• dozens of missed concerts and testimonies
• pilgrims going through their standard-issued pilgrim backpack
• photographing ads on buses and on subway platforms that somehow appealed to the “Masses” of Catholics who prayed and journeyed together for six unforgettable days in Sydney last year
• the media and what their “getup” looked like (an airy green thing that we wore like a life jacket), their positions and how covering Church events internationally differed from their normal jobs

I guess there’s always World Youth Day 2011.