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Giuseppe Monteduro found Jesus while lounging on his dorm-room couch. Three years ago, the University of Bologna political science major — who hadn't been to Mass since his mother dragged him along as a child in southeastern Italy — started watching soccer matches with a bright-eyed Uruguay native named Pablo Greco. Monteduro, then 20, couldn't quite understand why this easygoing classmate had such a hold on him. "There was a certain kind of charisma, but he was normal, kind of lazy like me," Monteduro recalls. "All I knew was that I wanted to be around him all the time. I didn't know it was CL."

The letters stand for Communion and Liberation, a conservative Catholic lay movement born in a Milan high school in 1954 that now claims 50,000 adherents around the world. Along with Opus Dei, Neocatechumenal Way and more recently established outfits like Youth 2000 and the Lednica movement in Poland, CL prospered during the papacy of John Paul II. These groups are widely credited with transforming young people's personal affinity for the late Pope into a greater devotion to the teachings and sacraments of the church. During a break from a recent CL retreat in the Italian Alpine town of La Thuile, Greco explained that there's no method to his mission of spreading Jesus' word: "I'm just myself. But it's like when you're in love, and you want to tell everyone." Monteduro describes how the movement changed everything for him, if very subtly. "I still do most of the things I always did, but I never experienced them in this way," he says. "It's not that you're never tired of life, but you know the Lord will always give you more energy."

Energetic young people like Greco and Monteduro are exactly what the Catholic Church in Europe needs. Church attendance is plummeting across the Continent. Between 1973 and 1998 the number of people in Ireland attending a religious service at least once a week dropped from 91% to 65%; in Italy, attendance dropped from 48% to 39%; and in France, from 19% to 5%. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer young men are entering the Catholic priesthood. Between 1978 and 2003, the total number of priests in Europe fell by 20%. So connecting with the next generation of young Catholics is crucial, and lay groups like Communion and Liberation — despite some concerns about how they recruit members — are central to that effort.

John Paul was an ardent promoter of these movements, and one of Pope Benedict's biggest challenges will be to build on that legacy to help revitalize — and rejuvenate — the church. His first test comes next week during the ninth World Youth Day gathering in Cologne, where some 800,000 Catholics will come together to sing and pray, and get a good look at the new Holy Father. The event will be the Pope's first giant step on the world stage, as well as a homecoming for the German Pontiff.

A lot of young Catholics may be ready for Benedict's message. Georgetown University professor Mark M. Gray compared data from surveys of Catholics around the world who were born after 1981, and came up with some unexpected results. Young people today are more likely to attend mass weekly, pray daily and trust their church than their parents' generation. More than 50% of young Catholics attend mass weekly, compared to 39% just a generation ago. Nearly 90% believe that religion is important, compared to 77% from the prior generation. "I had heard anecdotal evidence about the 'John Paul generation,' but finding a real tendency toward tradition was actually a surprise," says Gray.

What makes today's young people more ardent churchgoers than their elders? For Gabi Zecha, 37, an official with Youth 2000, it's the age-old search for meaning and communion: "Young people are more actively looking for truth and credibility than their parents were. They want to experience that faith is alive, that it's fun and joyful. And they want to experience it in a community of like-minded people." Even critics like Gordon Urquhart, a former member of Focolare — another proselytizing movement — accept that these groups offer a strong sense of belonging. "They provide a sense of being at the vanguard of history," he explains. "The belief that you're not just contributing to a united world but that you are the architects of it."

Not all Catholics have given groups like CL an unqualified welcome, though. Urquhart, who's written a book on Catholic lay movements, The Pope's Armada, criticizes what he calls the "secrecy" and "thought control" of the organizations. "The new movements work very anonymously," he says. "That's how they infiltrate [groups and parishes] without people even realizing they're being recruited." One Vatican official, who worked closely with the Pope when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that vets church doctrine, says there is some concern in Rome that the groups sometimes try to supplant the role of the local parish itself. "They are useful for spreading the Gospels, but they can overstep their role," the official says.

But Pope Benedict clearly wants to encourage Catholic youth movements. The Vatican official says Benedict has been an unabashed supporter. Indeed, two months before becoming Pope, he delivered a moving homily at the Milan funeral of Communion and Liberation founder Luigi Giussani, in which he declared, "[Giussani] understood that Christianity is not an intellectual system ... Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story." CL now operates in 64 countries, where it runs hundreds of study groups and career counseling offices on high school and university campuses. "The Pope understands well the need for new ways to spread the Gospel," says the official. "This is especially true in Europe."

Still, these groups will have to work hard to halt, much less reverse, the trend toward secularism in Europe. It's not clear, for example, how many young people, particularly in Western Europe, revered John Paul's austere message as much as the man himself. "The girls in St. Peter's Square who cheer the Pope have the pill in their pockets," Karl Cardinal Lehmann, head of the German Bishops' Conference, told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung last month. Two years ago, a survey commissioned by the Vicar of Rome, Camillo Cardinal Ruini, showed that just 10% of young Romans belonged to a church, and even those that did were unlikely to follow the basic tenets of Catholic doctrine. The church is also struggling to exert influence on European policymakers. The text of the proposed European constitution, for example, omitted any mention of God, despite the Vatican's lobbying, and protests by Catholics failed to stop the recent legalization of gay marriage in Spain (see following story).

Thus, a lot is riding on Benedict's ability to speak to youth. Adrien Naegelen, a 17-year-old from Lyon, will be in Cologne next week with his friends to greet — and size up — the new Pontiff. "Lots of us are going to test the Pope," he says, "to see what he is like and form an opinion." At 78, Benedict is the oldest Pope elected since 1730. His efforts to bring fresh energy to the church in Europe will depend in large part on whether he passes the tests of the young.

• JEFF ISRAELY / La Thuile
• Can the Pope win over the "John Paul generation" of newly devout young Catholics?