Downtown Cologne is being emptied as the Marienfeld area gets filled with youth who are awaiting the Pope, but the Cathedral square is still full of people and improvised pilgrims, who are not registered with the WYD, but who are here because they know they will find an audience of young people. There are the activists of Amnesty International who are collecting signatures against the death penalty in the Philippines, "because this is the right historic moment to bring pressure on the Philippine Government", says one of the German volunteers. There are members of the German Catholic movement who are distributing holy pictures and who have set up home-made posters on John Paul II and on Benedict XVI. And then there is an unusual pilgrim carrying a poster on his back-pack with the following words written in Italian "Romero saint. Stop illegal occupation in Iraq". Albert Koot, pastoral assistant in the diocese of Amsterdam has travelled from Holland on his bicycle and on a train. But why a slogan written in Italian? "Because I want to interact with the Italians and know what they think about the war in Iraq he explains – and using slogans is the only way of being noticed. I have already talked to many of them and I have understood that they are against the presence of troops in Iraq and that they consider as being absurd the fact that 65,000 people, both civilians and military, have died since the beginning of the war, as was recently reported by the British Red Cross". And why the association with Msgr. Romero? "Because 25 years have elapsed since his death he answers and his canonization has not yet occurred even though he is an example for many people. The procedure is too slow. I do hope he is beatified as soon as possible".
