The Pope was greeted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff
Benedict XVI, the German head of the Roman Catholic Church, has begun his first official visit to his home country as Pope.
He is to address the German parliament and say Mass in Berlin's Olympic Stadium during the four-day visit.He will meet former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and see Protestant leaders in Erfurt, where Martin Luther once lived.
The visit may be one of his most difficult to date, with strong protests expected against Catholic teachings.
The Pope was greeted at Berlin's Tegel airport by an artillery salute and a guard of honour.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff were both on hand to meet him.
The 84-year-old pontiff will travel widely across the country, where there are officially 25 million Catholics - one in three of the population.
He has visited Germany unofficially several times since assuming the Church's highest office, travelling to Catholic strongholds in the Rhineland and his native Bavaria.
However, this tour will take him into historically Protestant regions and parts of the atheistic old East Germany.
Mrs Merkel, daughter of a Lutheran pastor who grew up in East Germany, said Christian unity would be a focus of the Pope's visit.
In Erfurt on Friday, Pope Benedict will meet members of Germany's Lutheran Church in the monastery where Luther lived as a monk during the 16th Century.
'I can understand'
One of the highlights of the visit is an evening Mass to be held on Thursday at the Olympic Stadium.
The stadium is now a popular sporting and entertainment venue, and some 70,000 people are expected to attend the Mass.
He will end his visit at the weekend in the heavily Catholic city of Freiburg in the south-west.
The visit has attracted oppositin from various groups. Campaigners have taken issue with the Catholic stance on homosexuality and contraception, and some MPs - possibly as many as 100, or almost one in seven - plan to boycott his speech to parliament, the Bundestag, on Thursday.
Anti-Pope protesters handed out condoms at Berlin's Tegel airport German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, a Protestant, criticised the planned boycott, accusing MPs of "arrogance, narrow-mindedness and provincialism".
Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said he welcomed the Pope's visit and would meet him personally, but he also expressed understanding for the protesters.
Correspondents note that both Mr Wowereit and President Wullf, who is divorced and remarried, are Catholics who in the eyes of the Church lead sinful lifestyles.
Speaking to reporters on his plane from Rome, the Pope said he could understand those leaving the Church due to the sexual abuse scandals of recent years.
Mixed feelings
Nor, he said, had he anything against the planned demonstrations in protest at his visit, so long as they were civil.
"I can understand that in the face of such reports, people, especially those close to victims, would say 'this isn't my Church anymore'," he was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.
"There are many reasons for people leaving the Church in the context of a secular society. Leaving the Church is generally the final step along a long path of distancing oneself from the Church."
Some groups of Catholics who are demanding reform of the Church will also use the visit to express their views.
Sigrid Grabmeier, a spokeswoman of Catholic reform group Wir Sind Kirche (English: We are Church), said she had mixed feelings about the Pope's visit.
"I do not really know what he wants to tell us about really important things like justice and the world, or rich and poor people or something," she told the BBC World Service.
She called for a return to Christian basics, saying: "Jesus, he did not found a religion and he did not tell us how we should believe, but how we live."
0 comments:
Post a Comment