Only 46,000 seats will be available for the Mass at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., and 57,000 will be available at Yankee Stadium in New York City.

The stampede for free tickets — offered to all 195 Roman Catholic dioceses nationwide, in allotments from a handful to a thousand — was fierce. When the Archdiocese of Baltimore recently posted a notice about getting tickets on its website, the rush to get details shut down the site in an hour, said Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Washington, which is parceling out tickets for the Mass in the capital.

In Dallas, more than 300 letters flowed in from pastors attesting to parishioners' faithful requests for a scarce seat. Two of the archdiocese's 20 seats for the New York Mass will go to a woman who wrote about how beneficial it would be for her sick daughter to pray with the pontiff, archdiocesan spokeswoman Annette Gonzales Taylor said. "People are very excited about their faith and about coming together as a family with the Holy Father," she said.

The fire marshal has just signed off on the number of seats available at Washington's still-under-construction stadium, so letters are to go out Friday notifying dioceses how many seats they will have to distribute, Gibbs said.

In both cities, the bulk of the seats will go to local parishes and surrounding dioceses. For the Washington Mass, Gibbs said, 9,990 tickets will be divided among the nearby states of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Delaware. Another 14,000 will be divided among dioceses around the country.

New York is providing extra tickets to Boston, Philadelphia and Louisville, which are all marking bicentennials, and Baltimore, which celebrates 200 years as an archdiocese on April 18, two days before the Mass, Archdiocese of New York spokesman Joseph Zwilling said.

Many dioceses, mindful of the length and cost of the trip, have sought fewer than 100 tickets. For example, all 71 tickets designated for Phoenix at Yankee Stadium have already been claimed, and the diocese didn't see too many more for Washington because of the expense of the pilgrimage, diocesan spokesman James Dwyer said.

Don't expect to find tickets being scalped — security is tight, Zwilling said. Attending a Mass will be like taking an airline flight with bar-coded tickets; a government ID will be required, and Mass-goers may face the prospect of searches.

Also, it's a matter of principle: "We don't charge people to come to Mass," Zwilling said.

But the faithful around the USA will all be able to "attend" via the media, said Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Papal events will all be televised over the six-day visit. In Los Angeles, they will be broadcast in both English and Spanish.

It's still unclear whether Benedict might be seen on public streets in his "Popemobile," which he will use inside the stadiums.

But 600 hand-picked faithful will greet him when he arrives April 15 at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, on an Alitalia flight with Shepherd One painted on the side of the plane. Many of the 600 will be from the base.

Enlarge By Dario Pignatelli, Reuters Pope Benedict XVI blesses the faithful as he arrives to celebrate a mass at Santa Maria Liberatrice church in Rome on Sunday.

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