Pope wraps up trip to native country
Pope Benedict XVI today made an emotional visit to the cathedral where he became a priest, ending a six-day trip during which he warned his secular, socially liberal homeland not to let faith in reason and technology make it forget God.
Benedict uncharacteristically tossed aside his prepared text at the cathedral in Freising outside Munich, and instead spoke of his own frailty at age 79 and asked the audience of priests and bishops for their help.
“We all have to respect our limits, so much must be done and I can’t do it all,” he said. “It’s true for the pope as well, he must do so much and my strength simply isn’t enough for it.”
“So I must do what I can, and leave the rest to God and co-workers.”
It was another personal moment in a trip that showed the more human side of the pope, who sometimes seems stiff and shy in public and spent years as the church’s doctrinal watchdog. He arrived on Saturday in Munich wondering aloud if this would be his last visit home to the southern Bavaria region of his youth, and saying his heart “beats Bavarian".
Then he stopped at his birthplace in Marktl am Inn, knelt at his parents’ and sister’s graves in Regensburg at the cemetery near his old house, and spoke at the university there, where he once taught theology. He also saw his 82-year-old brother Georg Ratzinger, also a priest, and delighted his fellow Bavarians by taking time to shake hands and kiss babies.
Benedict made it clear however that the trip wasn’t just about him and his warm memories. At Sunday Mass for some 250,000 people in a large field outside Munich, he hammered home one of his favourite themes, the need for modern Europe to return to its historic Christian faith. In Germany, Mass attendance among Catholics is only around 14%.
“Put simply, we are no longer able to hear God – there are too many different frequencies filling our ears,” he said. “People in Asia and Africa admire our scientific and technical progress, but at the same time they are frightened by a form of rationality which totally excludes God from man’s vision, as if this were the highest form of reason.”
While warning against reason without faith, he also warned that faith needs reason, alluding to ancient Christian concerns about Islam and violence.
Many in the crowds had the sense that this visit could be Benedict’s farewell to his home and to them. At the airport as he left, he said, “Until we meet again, God willing.”
Oliver Berghammer, a 36-year-old engineer waiting for Benedict to ride by in Freising, didn’t expect to see the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in Bavaria again. “I don’t think so, you have to be realistic,” he said. “There are enough other people who deserve” a visit.
Antonia Denk, 58, said, “I don’t know. He is now there for the whole world, other countries want to see him too.”
People hung out banners and gathered two hours ahead of time to get a glimpse of the pope as he rode by on his way to the cathedral in the southern German town of Freising outside Munich. Well-wishers gathered two hours ahead of time just for a glimpse of the pope.
Martina Baumgarnter, a 22-year-old student from Erding, near Munich, said the trip had shown her the warmer side of the man who succeeded the charismatic John Paul II last year.
“I had the picture that he was more distant than his predecessor, that has changed a lot,” said Baumgartner, who also attended a Mass by Benedict on Sunday in Munich.
Greenery and yellow and white Vatican flags decorated a statue of the Virgin Mary along the popemobile’s route to the cathedral. Red and gold banners hung from windows, and someone had spelled Benedict’s name in yellow petals on the sidewalk, while a photo shop offered “the official Benedict in Freising T-shirt.”
The pope arrived in Freising by helicopter from Regensburg, where he visited the graves of his parents Wednesday and on Tuesday celebrated an open-air Mass for some 230,000 people.
Benedict was ordained in the Freising cathedral on June 29, 1951, with 42 others, including his brother.
He became archbishop of the Bavarian capital, Munich, in 1977, a post he held until moving to the Vatican in 1982 as the Roman Catholic Church’s top doctrinal official.
