(Death, Heaven, Purgatory, Hell)
Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults
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Pope Benedict vows new battle for souls
2005-04-25 22:15:59
By ROME
Pope Benedict XVI
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 4th 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 evangelizer, to make clear he saw a pressing need to revitalize
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 evangelization," he said. "At the start of the third
millennium, the Church feels with renewed vigor that the missionary mandate
from Christ is more current than ever."
Earlier in the day, Benedict seemed almost overcome by
joy and a touch of stage fright as he strode down the aisle of the Paul VI
audience hall through a crowd of several thousand German pilgrims who had
made the trip to Rome for his inauguration.
A shy Bavarian thrust into the limelight by his
election last Tuesday, he smiled amid the flashing camera lights and touched
grasping hands, then drew laughter and applause when he apologized for
arriving late from an inter-religious meeting.
"Germans are known for being punctual. It seems I've
become a bit of an Italian," he joked.
He also recounted that he had begged God not to make
him Pope as successive ballots by his fellow cardinals showed it was likely
that "the guillotine would fall" on him.
"God clearly didn't listen to me," he remarked with a
sigh.Benedict was elected Pope in a secret conclave after 23 years as the
chief guardian of Church orthodoxy.
A doctrinal conservative, he takes over the Church at
a time of ageing, falling congregations in its European homeland.
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 secularization, atheism and
materialism have been uppermost.