Jesus only had to feed 5,000. The pope has to contend with 57,000, or more, at the massive mass planned for next weekend at Yankee Stadium. (Your Humble Blogger, with Spouse, will be there.)

How do you pull off something like that? The New York Times offers a peek:

The pope will straddle second base in Yankee Stadium, but stand over center field at Nationals Park in Washington. There are 100,000 ponchos on hand in the Bronx in case of rain, while three Polish nuns have dusted off a gold and silver garment, hand-woven more than a century ago, for the pontiff to wear at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in the capital.

Tickets for the stadium Mass, many of them allocated to parishes based on average Sunday attendance and distributed by lottery, have been issued only to people who gave their names, addresses and dates of birth; a government-issued photo identification is required, and selling the tickets is forbidden.

With all its spiritual, political and cultural significance, the six-day visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Washington and New York next week is also a daunting logistical operation involving everything from candles and catering to cellphones and ciboria, the metal receptacles that hold communion wafers. Coordinating these and other details are high-ranking clergy, Hollywood producers and veterans of political advance teams, who will communicate in New York via two-way radios that double as cellphones and are equipped with global positioning satellite devices.

Among the profound — and mundane — questions they are confronting: How do 530 priests and deacons give communion to 57,000 people in 14 minutes?

“I just want to make sure it’s done reverently and safely,” the Rev. Msgr. Wallace A. Harris, the event coordinator for the Sunday afternoon Mass at Yankee Stadium on April 20, said at a practice Wednesday afternoon.

For starters, the priests — who are coming from as far away as Australia and Alaska — are assigned based on dates of birth, with the youngest (and most able-bodied) assigned to the upper deck, where stairs are narrow and steep and the winds are strongest. Leading priests on the upper deck will be the Rev. Kevin Malick, 28, who is from Staten Island, was ordained last May, works in a parish in New City, N.Y., and is a Mets fan. “I have a level head and a lot of common sense,” Father Malick said. “I’m not book smart, but I’m good at yelling at people.”

His counterpart on the field level, where the eldest priests are assigned, the Rev. Joseph E. Franco, who works at a Yankee-loving Bronx parish, warned five other priests at Wednesday’s rehearsal: “Remember, this isn’t a Yankees game, this is going to be an older crowd.”

If you head to the Times link, you can also catch a video that’s been prepared for clergy, to show them how to distribute communion. And you thought things were complicated in your parish?

Photo: Preparations for the pope’s Mass at Yankee Stadium were surveyed Wednesday by, from left, the Rev. Thomas Devery, the Rev. Joseph E. Franco and Rev. James Collins. Photo by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times