POPE Benedict XVI will visit Australia in 2008 after Sydney won the right to hold World Youth Day, according to a leading Vatican observer.

The six-day event, which will cost more than $120million, is expected to attract 80,000 international pilgrims and culminate in the Pope celebrating a mass expected to draw 250,000 people to Sydney’s Olympic Park during a final Sunday vigil in June.

His predecessor, John Paul II, last visited Australia in 1995.

Cardinal George Pell and the Sydney Archdiocese lobbied hard for the event, seen as the closest thing in Catholicism to the Olympic Games.

The formal announcement of Sydney’s victory will not be made until August 21, at the culmination of this year’s World Youth Day events in Cologne, Germany.

World Youth Day is held every two or three years. Sydney’s rivals for the next were Brazil and South Africa.

Vatican correspondent for the US weekly newspaper National Catholic Reporter, John Allen, regarded as the world’s leading English-language expert on theVatican, said the paper had learnt that Cardinal Pell’s efforts had paid off.

“The next World Youth Day will indeed be held Down Under, in Sydney,” he wrote.

“No prelate has been more ardent in expressing his desire to host a World Youth Day than Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia.”

Allen wrote that Cardinal Pell had pushed hard for the event, despite knowing that it did not come cheap.

German organisers recently estimated the cost of this month’s World Youth Day in Cologne at $120million.

Speculating on Cardinal Pell’s motives, he suggested that he might well consider the price cheap.

“World Youth Day is a jolt to the story that secularised society likes to tell itself, which is that religion is a quiet, private thing with little impact on the broader culture and little appeal for the young,” he said.

“Up against powerful social currents that press youth towards secular conceptions of identity and satisfaction, many bishops, including Pell, regard $120million as a relatively small price to pay to balance the scales, if only for a week.”

Cardinal Pell could not be contacted last night.NSW Premier Bob Carr has described the event as “the best and the biggest thing since the Olympics”. He has pledged high levels of government support and provision, at nominal cost, of security, medical services, transport and the use of public buildings.

A spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Sydney could not confirm that Sydney had won, saying the announcement would be made in Cologne.