A World Youth Day participant brandishes a cross during celebrations in Toronto. Photo: Tom Hanson/CP

A re-enactment of the last days of Jesus Christ — crucifixion and all — is expected to raise the religious fervour and, indeed, the eyebrows of World Youth Day watchers.

The "Way of the Cross" is a Catholic tradition as old as the religion itself and aims to enrich appreciation for the suffering and the glory of Jesus' brief life. WYD organizers have planned their own version of the medieval pageant Friday. It's set to take place on 14 stages along University Avenue and will itself travel while the audience sits put. Curtains on those stages are set to rise just after 7:15 p.m. EDT.

Although the company of 70 actors will be on the move, said Christina Parsons, a WYD spokeswoman, the audience won't miss any of the action if they pay close attention to 14 big screens set up along the route.

An actor playing Jesus will depict the tortured stages of Christ's passage to the cross. He too will be condemned to death, will take up his cross, fall under its weight and ultimately be hoisted above the crowd on that same crude frame.

Realism, said Ms. Parsons, is the objective. "It's an attempt to bring home the scarifices Jesus made for us."

But that realism is an odd fit for World Youth Day celebrations, says Raynel Martin, a non-Catholic Torontonian.

"This event has been billed as a kind of celebration of Catholicism and the Pope's relationship with young people," said the secretary. "Why dote on the more painful aspects of Jesus's death, especially where young people are concerned?"

The last scene in the three-hour spectacle will be Jesus's body in the tomb. Such religious reenactment often end with his resurrection.

Professor Roger Reynolds of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto says that a focus on Jesus's suffering — absent any depiction of his resurrection — is unusual.

"It's certainly odd that they would have as their last station an image of Jesus in the tomb," Professor Reynolds told globeandmail.com Friday.

The glory of the traditional Passion Play is that the audience is led through the darkness of the crucifixion to the brightness of Jesus's resurrection."

Still, the WYD event is expected to draw as many as 50,000 Torontonians, in addition to hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. It's a marvelous thing, said Professor Reynolds, given the mounting loss of Catholic ritual to a modern world.

"Passion Plays are still quite popular in Europe," he said. "But in North America we've lost a great part of our religious roots. I love to see those rituals revived."