Pope at St Paul's shrine

Pope Benedict pledged the Roman Catholic Church to a new push for converts yesterday on his first Papal visit outside the Vatican to the shrine of Christianity's first missionary.

Fresh from a jubilant audience with German pilgrims that shed the stress of his election and inauguration, the Pope, 78, journeyed to the southern suburbs of Rome to pray at the fourth century Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls.

The church, the largest in Rome after St Peter's Basilica, has associations with the theme of Christian unity.

The Pope, however, used his visit to the reputed burial place of St Paul, the co-founder of the Church with St Peter and its first evangeliser, to make clear he saw a pressing need to revitalise the quest to spread the Catholic message.

"This is a pilgrimage I very much desired to make... a pilgrimage, so to speak, to the roots of the mission," the Pope, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, said in his homily.

"The Church is by its very nature missionary, its first task is evangelisation," he said. "At the start of the third millennium, the Church feels with renewed vigour that the missionary mandate from Christ is more current than ever."

Vatican analysts say his choice of the name Benedict - after the 6th century patron saint of Europe - signals that his focus will be on a continent where Church concerns about secularisation, atheism and materialism have been uppermost.

He appeared to indicate that at St Paul's, with a seeming reference to former communist countries where his Polish predecessor John Paul canonised or beatified a large number of Catholics who died for their faith in the past 100 or so years.