NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT

Pope lauds 'power of love'
at Lourdes mass
by Carole Landry






LOURDES, France, Sept. 14 (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI celebrated an open-air mass in the French town of Lourdes on Sunday, leading more than 150,000 faithful in prayer at one of the most revered Roman Catholic shrines.

The Mass marked the 150th anniversary of the Vatican-recognised apparitions of the Virgin Mary to a French peasant girl in a grotto that now draws millions of pilgrims.

Under clear skies, the Pontiff spoke from a white podium set up on a sprawling field near the grotto where Mary is said to have appeared 18 times to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.

"There is a love in this world that is stronger than death, stronger than our weaknesses and sins. The power of love is stronger than the evil which threatens us," he said.

The 81-year-old Pontiff joined 230 bishops dressed in red flowing robes and mitres in the southwestern town, on the third day of his visit to France.

Singing hymns, tens of thousands of faithful, some wheelchair-bound or on stretchers, flocked to the prairie of the Lourdes sanctuary for the Sunday services delivered in several languages.

Lourdes is a magnet for the sick and disabled in search of a miracle cure from the water of the grotto's springs.

On Saturday, 260,000 people attended Mass in central Paris during which the Pope appealed to young Catholics to shun the false "idols" of the modern world and told them not to be "afraid" of a religious life.

Despite its deep Christian heritage, France is facing a freefall in the number of churchgoers, with only 10 percent of Catholics saying they attend mass regularly.

Benedict was to meet with French bishops later Sunday to discuss the state of French Catholicism.

"He is a man of great depth and I feel close to him," said Jeanne, 70, from Saint-Etienne, in central France. "He may not be as telegenic as John Paul, but he has a deep faith."

During an emotional visit to the shrine in 2004, a year before his death, John Paul declared himself "a sick man among the sick" as he struggled with advanced Parkinson's disease.

Benedict arrived Saturday for a pilgrimage to the town in the foothills of the Pyrenees that draws six million people every year.

After visiting a church where Bernadette was baptised and the small room where her family lived in poverty, the Pope went to the place where she had 18 "encounters" with the Madonna.

The Pontiff knelt in prayer at the grotto of Masiabelle and drank a glass of water from the "miracle" springs, which was presented to him by a young girl.

Benedict is to lead a special Mass on Monday dedicated to the sick and ends his pilgrimage at a hospital chapel where Bernadette received the sacrament of the first communion.

The leader of the world's one billion Catholics is making his first visit to France since his election in 2005.

The Pope arrived in Paris on Friday, meeting with President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has called for easing France's strict secularism defined in a 1905 law on the separation of church and state.

Sarkozy, a twice-divorced lapsed Catholic, broke a French taboo during a trip to the Vatican last year by calling for a "positive secularism" that would allow space for religion in public life.

The Pope sought to build on Sarkozy's position, saying Europe faced "disaster" if it turned away from religion.




Pope urges pilgrims at Lourdes
to remain hopeful
By FRANCES D'EMILIO



LOURDES, France, Sept. 14 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass on Sunday at the Lourdes shrine renowned for miracles, telling tens of thousands of faithful they should hold onto hope in a world full of evil, torture, suffering and injustice.

About 50,000 pilgrims, singing hymns and some shouldering a life-sized crucifix, gathered on a rain-soaked field known as the Lourdes prairie for the Mass marking the 150th anniversary of a peasant girl's religious visions. Millions visit the spot each year to pray for miracles of physical or spiritual healing.

The Pope urged the pilgrims to remain hopeful in the face of evil and hardship.

"The power of love is stronger than the evil which threatens us," Benedict said.

The Pope is making a three-day pilgrimage to the sanctuary, which is visited each year by 6 million pilgrims. Many believe miracles can be delivered by Bernadette Soubirous — the 14-year-old daughter of peasants who in 1858 told local clergy she had seen the Virgin Mary appear to her at the Massabielle riverside grotto.

"For 150 years, pilgrims have never ceased to come to the grotto of Massabielle to hear the message of conversion and hope which is addressed to them. And we have done the same," Benedict said, reading his homily from a platform where an altar was set up.

The Catholic church's liturgy on Sept. 14 is focused on the symbol of the cross.

Benedict told the crowd that the cross initiates the faithful into the mysteries of Christian faith, including that "there is a love in this world that is stronger than death, stronger than our weaknesses and sins."

Jesus in his death by crucifixion "took upon himself the weight of all the sufferings and injustices of our humanity," the pope said. "He bore the humiliation and the discrimination, the torture suffered in many parts of the world by so many of our brothers and sisters for the love of Christ."

The 81-year-old Pontiff said the faithful should live their lives in "invincible hope, refusing to believe those who claim that we are trapped in the fatal power of our destiny."

Benedict spent Saturday night at a hermitage, after praying at the Lourdes grotto where a spring of water broke through the ground during the months Bernadette saw the apparitions of Mary.

The Pope drank some of the water in the grotto. But he had said Friday he was not coming to seek miracles at Lourdes, which he has likened to a citadel of hope.

Countless believers in the water's healing power come to Lourdes to drink or bathe in it, and bring home flasks and even gas-can sized plastic containers of the spring's water.

French bishops came to Lourdes for a meeting later Sunday with the pope, who wants to shore up flagging faith in the traditionally Roman Catholic country where Mass attendance is very low.

Among the pilgrims at Sunday's Mass was a group of Spanish students who had slept on mats on the floor of Lourdes' basilica.

"In Lourdes you can feel the Catholic faith more strongly than in other places," said Ines Belinchon, a high-school student on her fifth trip to Lourdes, where she has often come to help the sick.






Love stronger than evil,
Pope tells Lourdes crowd
By Philip Pullella



LOURDES, France, Sept. 14 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, on a pilgrimage to the shrine where the faithful believe the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl 150 years ago, told a crowd on Sunday that love can be stronger than all the evil in the world.

The 81-year-old Benedict said a Mass for more than 100,000 people on a field in the shadow of the sanctuary built over the spot of the apparitions in 1858.

Pilgrims flocked here from dozens of countries for the pope's three-day visit, his 10th abroad and his first to France.

When he arrived on Saturday night, Benedict prayed in the grotto where Bernadette Soubirous said the Madonna appeared and spoke to her 18 times and he drank water from a spring that believers say has healing powers.

In the past 150 years, the Church has recognized as "miracles" more than 65 medically inexplicable healings of sick pilgrims who visited Lourdes.

Benedict, saying Mass from under white canopies shaped like sails, told his listeners to be true to their faith because "it tells us that there is a love in this world that is stronger than death, stronger than our weakness and sins."

Wearing red, white and gold vestments, he told a crowd wrapped in jackets against an unusually cold late summer day that "the power of love is stronger than the evil which threatens us."

Since his arrival in France on Friday, the Pope has been effectively giving the country's Catholics a series of pep talks, urging them not to be afraid to live their faith in public.

He has been encouraging them to speak out confidently in a country where "laicite," the separation of church and state that often relegates faith to the private sphere, is part of the national psyche.

Religion has re-emerged as a factor in public life, especially because of the growth of Islam, and French Catholics have increasingly spoken out on social issues.

The once powerful French Church struggles with a shortage of priests and Sunday mass attendance is below 10 percent.

In his homily at Lourdes, the Pope told his listeners to reject the concept that praying is "wasting time" and made a particular appeal to young people not to be afraid to answer God's call for them to enter the religious life as priests or nuns.

At the end of a candlelight procession late on Friday night, Benedict asked the world not to forget the victims of terrorism and hatred.

"We think of innocent victims who suffer from violence, war, terrorism and famine; those who bear the consequences of injustices, scourges and disasters, hatred and oppression; of attacks on their human dignity and fundamental rights, on their freedom to act and think," he said.

The Pope spoke two days after the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks against the United States.

Lourdes was the last foreign destination visited by Pope John Paul II before his death in 2005.