Anyone eager to get a peek at the pope when he visits the U.S. next spring will probably need divine intervention, according to CNS:

Pretty much the only chances the general public will have will be at Masses at the Washington Nationals’ new baseball stadium, with a capacity of about 45,000, and Yankee Stadium in New York, which has a capacity of perhaps 65,000.

The youths and seminarians rally at New York’s St. Joseph’s Seminary also is listed as a public event, but Joseph Zwilling, communications director for the New York Archdiocese, told Catholic News Service the 15,000 to 20,000 spots will be filled primarily with people from the New York region and some of the approximately 5,000 seminarians in the country.

All other papal events will be closed to anyone who isn’t specifically invited, said Zwilling and Susan Gibbs, communications director for the Washington Archdiocese. Invitations and plans for those events are being handled by various organizations including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Archdiocese of New York, the White House and the United Nations.

The New York Archdiocese has basic information about how tickets will be handled on its Web site. It notes that tickets to the stadium Mass will probably be distributed through parishes; and tickets to the youth rally will be distributed by Catholic schools, youth groups and religious education programs.

Gibbs told CNS a similar strategy will probably be used for tickets to the Mass at the Nationals’ stadium. She said she expects information to be released soon about how the tickets will be allocated.

Zwilling said some seats for the Yankee Stadium Mass will be allotted for people from the three U.S. archdioceses that along with New York are celebrating bicentennials in 2008 — Louisville, Ky., Philadelphia and Boston. He said another batch of tickets will be set aside for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, which was the original see in the United States.

How tickets are distributed by other dioceses will be up to them to decide, he said. However, applicants for Mass tickets will have to provide name, address and other information and must show an ID to be admitted to the stadium, according to the archdiocese’s Web site.

The tickets will be nontransferable, it notes, warning that any tickets for sale through brokers or Web sites are fraudulent.

The Washington Archdiocese has not yet settled on its procedures, Gibbs said, but they likely will be similar to New York’s. The archdiocese has already received hundreds of requests for tickets from individuals, tour companies and parishes.

“We’ve heard from tour companies that are planning pilgrimages, from youth groups, from individuals wanting 27 tickets,” she said. Others are a bit audacious, like those who have asked whether their season tickets to the Nationals baseball games entitle them to use those seats for the papal Mass, she said. (They don’t.)