EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE: THE POPE IN BAVARIA
Benedict blesses new adoration chapel, stresses role of Mary

Pope Benedict XVI processes with the Blessed Sacrament from the altar from the outdoor Mass to a new adoration chapel in the Church of Sts. Philip and James Sept. 11 in downtown Altotting, Germany. Herald/Bill Howard

Bill Howard
Sep 11, 2006 2:30 PM
ALTOTTING, Germany. On his second full day in Bavaria, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass and blessed a new Eucharistic adoration chapel in Altotting, led Vespers inside the Cathedral of St. Anne there, visited the home of his birthplace in Marktl am Inn and finished the day at a seminary in Regensburg.

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Pope entered the middle stretch of his six-day pilgrimage to his homeland, an event which has featured beautiful weather and tens of thousands of pilgrims – in the case of Munich, 250,000 people -- wearing colorful souvenir bandanas or traditional clothing.

In his return to Altotting, where he often prayed as a child, Pope Benedict XVI called for a dependency on Christ in the image of his mother. The connection to Mary flowed from the fact that Altotting features one of the world’s major Marian shrines and is a major Marian pilgrimage site.

Tens of thousands of people descended on this small town 90 minutes east of Munich for the pope’s second outdoor Mass of his six-day pilgrimage to his home state of Bavaria. After Mass in the town square next to Saints Philip and James Church, he led a Eucharistic procession to a new adoration chapel annexed to the church.

In his homily, Pope Benedict XVI stuck to his prepared text and did not allude to the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. A reference was made during the prayers of the faithful.

“We ask, five years after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, for peace in the entire world,” read a translation of part of the prayer, given in German.

In his homily text, Benedict continued his message of opening our hearts to allow Christ to lead us in our lives. He focused on the Virgin Mary’s trust of Jesus and called on the attendees to trust Christ enough to let him lead our lives.

“She teaches us to pray . . . not by seeking to affirm our own will and our own desires before God, but by letting him decide what he wants to do,” he said. “From Mary, we learn graciousness and readiness to help, but we also learn humility and generosity in accepting God’s will in the conviction that whatever he says in response will be best for us.”

Throughout his trip, Pope Benedict has maintained a theme of making Christ a more active part of our lives, particularly in evangelization of others in an increasingly relativistic world. In his homily, he pointed to the day’s Gospel reading, where Christ performs his first public miracle by turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana.

Benedict said that Christ’s apparent initial refusal of his mother’s request to provide the guests with more wine allowed her to more fully abandon herself to him, leading her to say, “Do whatever he tells you.”

“Jesus is not a wonder-worker; he does not play games with his power in what is, after all, a private affair,” Benedict said. “He does not merely ‘make’ wine, but transforms the human wedding feast into an image of the divine wedding feast, to which the Father invites us through the Son and in which he gives us every good thing.”

“The wedding feast becomes an image of the cross, where God showed his love to the end, giving himself in his son in flesh and blood – in the son who instituted the sacrament in which he gives himself to us for all time,” he continued. “Thus a human problem is solved in a way that is truly divine and the initial request is superabundantly granted.”

Benedict concluded his homily with a call for more participation by the church in eucharistic adoration.

“May our reception of him not be reduced to the moment of communion alone. Jesus remains present in the sacred Host and he awaits us constantly,” he said. “Mary and Jesus go together. Through Mary we want to continue our converse with the Lord and to learn how to receive him better.”

The pope is scheduled to spend all of Sept. 12 in Regensburg, including the celebration of an outdoor Mass at Islinger Field, a meeting about science with representatives of the University of Regensburg and the celebration of Vespers at the Cathedral of Regensburg.

As has been his custom during the trip, the 79-year-old Pope Benedict takes a 3-4 hour break each day for a nap and relaxation.