SYDNEY, Australia - Pope Benedict has urged young people to reject the "spiritual desert" that he says is spreading throughout the world.

Benedict said at a mass Sunday before more than 200,000 young Roman Catholic pilgrims that they would be responsible for building a new age free from greed, apathy and selfishness.

He said that along with material wealth a spiritual desert is spreading throughout the world, describing it as an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.

Sunday's Mass wraps up the six-day World Youth Day festival in Sydney that has drawn massive crowds of pilgrims to Australia's largest city.

It has been watched on television by a global audience estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.

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