Cologne, Germany – Pope Benedict XVI triumphantly ended his four-day trip to his native Germany on Sunday, celebrating an open-air Mass for a million people and warning Europe against growing secularism and “do-it-yourself” religion.
A synagogue visit, in which he won applause for his warning about rising anti-Semitism, and a frank talk with Muslims about terrorism underlined interfaith relations as a key theme of his first foreign travel as pope.
During his closing homily at Sunday Mass, Benedict told those gathered for the church’s 20th World Youth Day festival in Cologne, Germany, that there was a “strange forgetfulness of God,” while at same time the sense of frustration and dissatisfaction has led to a “new explosion of religion.”
“I have no wish to discredit all the manifestations of this phenomenon,” he said. “Yet, if it is pushed too far, religion becomes almost a consumer product. People choose what they like, and some are even able to make a profit from it.
“But religion constructed on a ‘do-it-yourself’ basis cannot ultimately help us,” he said.
The throngs from almost 200 countries had been invited to the festival by a different pope, the charismatic John Paul II, before his death April 2.
But they embraced his 78- year-old, more subdued successor with the same huge turnout, shouts and applause on his first foreign trip as pope.
“Beeen-e-DET-to, Beeen-e- DET-to,” they chanted, using the Italian version of his name. Some 800,000 of them spent the night in the Marienfeld, or Mary’s Field, outside Cologne, sleeping on the ground so they could attend Sunday’s Mass. Flags from dozens of countries floated over the crowd.
Benedict returned to Rome on Sunday night by airplane. During the flight, the pontiff posed for photos with German journalists.
Benedict used his trip to make it clear that he intends to continue key parts of John Paul’s heritage.
