By Matthew Gambino • Posted September 10, 2015

The 10,000 tickets for the Mass that Pope Francis will celebrate Sept. 27 on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway were snatched up just 30 seconds after they became available Wednesday night, Sept. 9.

That was even quicker than the two minutes it took to exhaust the 10,000 tickets for the Festival of Families and 10,000 for the pope’s address at Independence Hall, both on Sept. 26.

People who obtained tickets will need to pass through security checkpoints to enter the reserved zone on the parkway, where their ticket’s bar code will be scanned.

For participants without a ticket, unreserved areas of the parkway will still offer views toward the Philadelphia Museum of Art where the Mass will be celebrated, at Eakins Oval.

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Thirty-one Jumbotron screens along the parkway provide live coverage of the Mass and all other events during the Sept. 26-27 events for people near the altar and farther back. The reserved section runs along the parkway from roughly 23rd Street to 20th Street; all the blocks east of 20th are unreserved.

Besides televised coverage, Pope Francis will get a close-up glimpse of almost everyone attending when his motorcade passes slowly along the parkway on both sides, from the Art Museum to City Hall and back before Saturday’s Festival of Families and on a shorter route, to be determined, prior to the Mass on Sunday.