c. 2005 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ At a massive Sunday (April 24) Mass marking the formal start of his papal reign, Pope Benedict XVI received a symbolic fisherman’s ring and proclaimed that the Roman Catholic Church is alive and young and will show the world the “way toward the future.”
Describing himself as a weak servant of God, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 78, made an emotional appeal for the prayers of the people so he could be a listening good shepherd who lovingly leads his flock and an obedient fisherman who helps pull souls from the sea of suffering.
He urged renewed efforts to seek Christian unity and urged the young not to be afraid of Christ because “he takes nothing away, and he gives you everything.”
The pope’s bold and forward-looking homily, which was interrupted by applause 39 times, projected a very different figure than the rigid portrait some had made of Cardinal Ratzinger, “God’s rottweiler,” who as the conservative head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, cracked down on deviations from the centuries-old morals and faith of the church.
In a dramatic ending to the outdoor Mass, Benedict drove through St. Peter’s Square standing in a white, open-topped jeep, a visual contrast to the bullet-proof “popemobile” that his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, used after being targeted by an assassin in 1981. A slight figure in gold brocade vestments and mitre, Benedict XVI smiled and raised his right hand in a blessing as church bells rang, the music of Bach resounded from an organ inside St. Peter’s Basilica and pilgrims cheered and waved flags. Many were black, yellow and red, the colors of Benedict’s native Germany
Authorities said 350,000 people crowded into the square and filled the broad avenue that stretches back to the River Tiber. Another 400,000 watched the Mass on giant television screens outside the Basilica of St. John Lateran and in two other piazzas in the center of Rome.
Brian MacNeil, 24, of Boston, who traveled from Florence where he is studying, said he was impressed by the beauty of the Mass. “I’m pleased with the new pope because of his interest in the liturgy and the way he admires it,” he said.
Dignitaries representing 141 countries and international organizations and 31 Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant churches sat by an altar carpeted with 20,000 spring flowers.
Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, President Bush’s brother and a convert to Catholicism, led the U.S. delegation. President Horst Kohler and Chancellor Gerhard Schroder headed the German delegation, and the pope’s brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, 81, traveled to Rome from their native Bavaria, Germany. Queen Sofia of Spain, who accompanied King Juan Carlos, was in a dress and mantilla of white, a color only Catholic royalty may wear to a papal Mass.
Sixteen days after he presided over the funeral of his close friend, Pope John Paul II, who died on April 2, Pope Benedict XVI returned to the square as John Paul’s successor, elected by his fellow cardinals last Tuesday (April 19) to lead the world’s more than 1 billion Catholics. He concelebrated with 150 cardinals dressed in white vestments trimmed with gold.
In his homily, Benedict recalled the estimated 3 million people, many of them young, had who gathered in and around St. Peter’s Square during the final days of John Paul’s illness, and then after his death.
“Yes, the church is alive _ this is the wonderful experience of these days,” the new pope said to applause. “During those sad days of the pope’s illness and death it became wonderfully evident to us that the church is young. She holds within herself the future of the world and therefore shows each of us the way towards the future.”
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Memories of John Paul figured prominently in the Mass. Benedict quoted him and took on two of the late pope’s key concerns, the quest for Christian unity and evangelization of the young.
Benedict described himself as a “weak servant of God,” who is assuming an “enormous task, which truly exceeds all human capacity.” Evoking the biblical parable of the good shepherd, he made an emotional appeal for the prayers of his flock.
“My dear friends, at this moment I can only say: pray for me that I may learn to love the Lord more and more. Pray for me that I may learn to love his flock more and more _ in other words you, the holy church, each one of you and all of you together. Pray for me that I may not flee for fear of the wolves. Let us pray for one another that the Lord will carry us and that we will learn to carry one another.”
The new pope’s program for governing the church, he said, “is not to do my own will, not to pursue my own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole church, to the world and will of the Lord, to be guided by him so that he himself will lead the church at this hour of our history.”
A high point of the two-hour Mass was a solemn new ceremony after the reading of the Gospel in which the new pope received a woolen stole called the pallium and the fisherman’s ring harking back to the Apostle Peter, which are the symbols of his office as the 264th successor of Peter. The ceremony was an innovation intended to replace the act of crowning the pope, which was abolished by John XXIII.
Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez of Chile placed the pallium around Benedict’s neck, and Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state and Benedict’s successor as dean of the College of Cardinals, presented him with the gold seal ring.
Benedict devoted much of his four-page homily to the significance of the the pallium and ring.
The pallium is a symbol of the mission of the pastor, who like the Good Shepherd, must lead the lost sheep of humanity out of the desert, he said.
The fisherman’s ring bears an image of Peter, his boat and his net, which figure in two Gospel accounts of miraculous catches of fish.
Benedict said that while fish die when removed from the sea, “in the mission of a fisher of men the reverse is true.”
“We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death, in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendor of God’s light, into true new life,” the pope said.
Mankind is not “some casual and meaningless product of evolution” but “the result of a thought of God,” he said.
Benedict said that the image of both the shepherd and the fisherman are “an explicit call to unity” among Christians, and he urged Catholics to pray for unity. Offering his own prayer, he said, “Grant that we may be one flock and one shepherd. Do not allow your net to be torn. Help us to be servants of unity!”
Concluding the homily, Benedict expanded on what became John Paul’s most well-known refrain, “Do not be afraid.”
“And so today with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundred-fold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ _ and you will find true life,” Benedict said.
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