c. 2005 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Returning to the Sistine Chapel to celebrate his first Mass as pope, Benedict XVI pledged Wednesday (April 20) to continue the mission of Pope John Paul II and to actively seek dialogue within the Catholic Church and with other religions.

Invoking the name and accomplishments of his predecessor 14 times, the new pope made clear his desire for continuity in the church during his homily addressed to the 114 cardinals who had elected him pope less than 24 hours earlier.

“Pope John Paul II,” he said, “left a church that is more courageous, freer and younger, a church that, according to his teaching and example, looks with serenity to the past and does not fear the future.”

Dressed in gold and white vestments, Benedict presided over the Mass below Michelangelo’s fresco of “The Last Judgment,” in the same chapel where the cardinals’ two-day conclave was held Monday and Tuesday. The pope spoke in Latin, the traditional lingua franca of the church.

In his first full day on the job, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger met with old friends and colleagues and visited the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace, said Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Vatican’s chief spokesman.

After the Mass, he drove to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and had a “very cordial meeting” with the staff of the Vatican department he headed for nearly a quarter-century, the spokesman said.

Then he broke the seals that were placed on the papal apartment after John Paul’s death April 2 and visited his old apartment just outside the Vatican walls. Benedict had lunch with Vatican officials at the Domus Santa Marta, the official residence for cardinals during the conclave, and will continue to live there for the immediate future.

On Friday the pope will hold an audience for all the cardinals who are still in Rome. On Saturday, he will meet with journalists who have been covering the death and funeral of John Paul and his own election.

On Sunday, Rome officials are expecting some 500,000 people to converge on St. Peter’s Square for the Mass that will formally inaugurate the new pontificate.

As the church began to assess the new pope, Ratzinger offered his own thoughts. Belying his reputation as a fierce and unremitting defender of doctrinal orthodoxy, Benedict told cardinals at the Mass that he felt “a sense of inadequacy and of human anxiety” over his new responsibilities but also “a profound gratitude to God.”

Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, one of the 11 American cardinals who voted in the conclave, warned against trying to “put labels on” Benedict, whom critics have called “God’s Rottweiler” and “the grand inquisitor.”

“We have to get to know this man, and the more people do that the more they will love and appreciate him,” Mahony said at a joint news conference with six other U.S. cardinals.

Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit described Benedict as “a very humble man, a holy man, an instrument of his time.” He said that just as John Paul was called from the East to face the threat of communism, Benedict has been called from the West to counter the secularization of Europe.

The tone of Benedict’s first speech as pope stood in sharp contrast to his homily Monday before the opening of the conclave, in which he denounced a “dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

On Wednesday, Benedict spoke with emotion of John Paul, saying, “I seem to feel his strong hand that clasps mine; I seem to see his smiling eyes and to hear his words, addressed in this moment particularly to me: `Do not be afraid.”’

As Cardinal Ratzinger, the new pope was one of John Paul’s closest and most trusted associates. They met regularly each Friday.

Benedict asked the cardinals to “sustain me with prayer and with constant, active and wise collaboration,” and requested prayer and counsel from bishops. At the same time, however, he made clear that he would retain the ultimate power of the papacy.

Quoting John Paul, Benedict said he too intended to make the Second Vatican Council the “compass with which to orient ourselves in the vast ocean of the third millennium.” Both men played an active role in the council, which met in the 1960s to reform and renew the church.

Although he wrote in the declaration “Dominus Iesus” in 2000 that only Catholics may have “the fullness of salvation,” Benedict strongly endorsed the quest for Christian unity and interfaith dialogue.

As pope, he said, he is “fully determined to cultivate every initiative that can appear opportune to promote contacts and understanding with representatives of the different churches and ecclesial communities.”

In addition, he said the church wanted to continue “open and sincere dialogue” with members of other faiths and all those who “seek an answer to the fundamental demands of existence and have not yet found it.”

Benedict also endorsed three events called by John Paul. He confirmed that he would attend World Youth Day celebrations in Cologne, Germany, in August, said he wanted bishops to meet as planned in a synod at the Vatican in October and urged intensified observances of the current Year of the Eucharist.

KRE/PH END POLK