Pope Benedict's last engagement in Freiberg: winds of change

Pope Benedict adressed German Catholics working for the Church and for society on the final day of his state visit to Germany. The encounter took place at the Concert Hall in the south western city of Freiburg. Our correspondent travelling with the Pope is Veronica Scarisbrick and she filed this report:

"Music for Benedict XVI’s last appointment in Germany at a state-of-the-art Konzerthaus.

And the German Pontiff was glad to be together with his Catholic fellow Germans with those engaged at a Church and social level. “This is a welcome opportunity , the Pope said, to personally thank you for your commitment and witness as powerful heralds of the faith, for standing up for the Church”. Remarking how this is no easy task at present.

On this occasion Benedict XVI, admitted to the current trend of declining religious practice in Germany, a nation which has recently seen substantial numbers of Catholics drifting away from Church, prompting the question, the Pope said, as to whether the Church should change?

Then stepping back in time, the Pope quoted from Paul VI, the Roman Pontiff who first chose him as one of his closest advisors, who once highlighted the distance between the Church and the world around it :

“If the Church is now struggling “to model itself on Christ's ideal”, Paul VI said, this “can only result in its acting and thinking quite differently from the world around it, which it is nevertheless striving to influence” In order to accomplish her mission, she will constantly set herself apart from her surroundings, she needs in a certain sense to become unworldly or “de-secularized”.

Considering Paul VI died thirty three years ago, I thought perhaps there’s nothing new since those post Vatican Council days.

Yet moments later Benedict XVI better explained this distance between the Church and the world around it from a historical perspective, expressing the idea that time has shown how when the Church becomes less worldly her missionary witness shines more brightly and can reach out more effectively to the whole world in a truly Christian way. It is not a question, he insisted, of finding a new strategy to re-launch the Church. Rather, it is a question of setting aside mere strategy and seeking total transparency, not bracketing or ignoring anything from the truth of our present situation, but living the faith fully here and now in the utterly sober light of day, appropriating it completely, and stripping away from it anything that only seems to belong to faith, but in truth is mere convention or habit.


And on this last occasion he had to publicly speak before leaving the country, the Pope ,towards the end of his address pointed to how the Church here has unfortunately been overshadowed in recent times by painful scandals on the part of the preachers of the faith.

A line this short but hardly sweet and a clear reference here in his last homily on German soil to the recent clerical sexual abuse scandal which rocked Catholics and which led to huge numbers leaving the Catholic Church.

Let’s recall for a moment how Pope Benedict XVI met with five victims of this abuse on Friday evening in Erfurt expressing his deep regret and assuring the Church’s commitment to preventing such crimes in the future.And how on the plane on his way to Germany he had told reporters he understood the feelings of those who have left the Church because of this.

All the more then, the Pope stressed, is it time once again for the Church resolutely to set aside her worldliness. That does not mean withdrawing from the world. A Church relieved of the burden of worldliness is in a position, not least through her charitable activities, to mediate the life-giving strength of the Christian faith to those in need, to sufferers and to their carers.

But Benedict XVI ended on a hopeful note inviting those present as individuals and as the community of the Church, to live the simplicity of a great love, which is both the simplest and hardest thing on earth, because it demands no more and no less than the gift of oneself."

Listen to Veronica's report: