Pope wraps up first ‘home’ state visit

Pope Benedict XVI flew out of his native Germany yesterday after celebrating Mass with around 100,000 on the final day of a visit that has disappointed many inside and outside the Church.

The two-hour Mass was one of the high points of an exhausting trip, his first state visit home that took the 84-year-old Pontiff from Berlin and Erfurt in eastern Germany to this staunchly Catholic university town in the southwest.

When Pope Benedict arrived for the ceremony at an airfield in brilliant sunshine yesterday morning in the specially built “popemobile”, mothers held up babies and toddlers for him to bless and kiss.

Pope Benedict urged German Catholics to overcome their internal differences and remain faithful and obedient to Rome in “this time of danger and radical change” and a “crisis of faith.”

And in remarks seemingly aimed at German Catholic groups clamouring for change, he said: “The Church in Germany will continue to be a blessing for the entire Catholic world: if she remains faithfully united with the successors of Saint Peter and the apostles.”

During a total of 18 separate addresses over the past four days, some of his comments have been taken to be stern criticism of the German Church. In one of his final speeches, in Freiburg’s concert hall, the Pontiff warned of the Church “giving greater weight to organisation and institutionalisation than to her vocation to openness.”

And earlier, he had complained about believers “whose life of faith is ‘routine’ and who regard the Church merely as an institution, without letting their hearts be touched by faith.”

But Hans Langendoerfer, coordinator of the trip, and Germany’s top Archbishop, Robert Zollitsch, insisted that such criticism was not targeted specifically at the Catholic Church in Germany. In fact, at a lunch with members of the German Bishops’ Conference after the Mass, Archbishop Langendoerfer said the Pope had said: “I know these are difficult times for the Church in Germany. Many are leaving the herd. But you are the shepherds and you’re good shepherds.”

The Pope has used his trip to call on German Catholics to hammer home his ultra-conservative credo on a range of issues such as artificial contraception, abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage.