c. 2005 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Holding the first general audience of his reign in a sun-swept St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday (April 27), Pope Benedict XVI showed a change in style, but not content, from his predecessor, John Paul II.

Some 20,000 pilgrims gathered in a festive atmosphere to applaud the white-haired pontiff as he was driven slowly around the square for 15 minutes, standing up in a white jeep, smiling, waving and blessing the crowd.

The most striking contrast between Benedict and John Paul was physical.

The new pope at 78 is 20 years older than John Paul was at his election in 1978, but Benedict appears younger than his age and strikingly healthy compared to John Paul in his last years. Suffering from Parkinson’s disease, the late pope was confined to a wheelchair and barely able to speak.

“He doesn’t look like 78. He looks 10 years younger, and what a wonderful head of hair,” said Gladys Nolan of Montreal, who described herself as a non-practicing Catholic. “He may be a transitional pope, but I think he’ll be just fine.”

“I have a feeling that he’ll be good. He knows his job,” said her traveling companion, Regis Briand. “If what happened to John Paul happens to him in 10 years, he’ll tough it out.”

Although Benedict, when he was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was one of John Paul’s closest collaborators for almost a quarter of a century and it is said that he was the late pope’s choice for a successor, their styles are very different.

John Paul was a polyglot, philosopher, playwright and poet, but he had an earthy quality as well. When he read his discourses he often wet his thumb and forefinger on his tongue before turning the page and sometimes wiped his nose on the sleeve of his white cassock. He wore an inexpensive metal watch with a stretchable band.

Benedict is a noted theologian and scholar, who was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that polices matters of faith and morals. He speaks Latin fluently, likes to play Mozart on his piano, eats sparingly and drinks hardly at all. He wears a German-made watch of titanium powered by a solar panel.

Their gestures are also different. John Paul greeted pilgrims with an up-and-down motion of his hands held palm upward while Benedict spreads his arms wide and then clasps them above his head.

Following the format of a general audience established half a century ago, Benedict delivered a catechesis, or teaching, in Italian; shorter versions in French, English, his native German and Spanish; and greetings in Croatian, Slovenian, Italian and John Paul’s native Polish.

Benedict used his first general audience to introduce himself, but said that starting next week he will pick up where John Paul left off in a series of teachings about the psalms and canticles just as John Paul continued the catecheses of Pope Paul VI.

The church, he said, is indebted to John Paul for “an extraordinary spiritual heritage.”

The pope told the pilgrims that he felt “amazement and gratitude to God” for his election on April 19, as well as “interior trepidation before the magnitude of the task and the responsibility that has been entrusted to me.”

Benedict said he had chosen to call himself after the World War I pope, Benedict XV, a “courageous and authentic prophet of peace,” and St. Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, who declared that “absolutely nothing must become before Christ.”

St. Benedict, a co-patron saint of Europe, is “highly venerated in Germany and, in particular, in Bavaria, the land of my origin,” the pope said. “He constitutes a fundamental reference point for European unity and a strong call to the Christian roots of its culture and civilization, which cannot be renounced.”

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John Paul, too, made constant reference to the Christian roots of an increasingly secularized Europe and waged a strong but unsuccessful campaign to have them affirmed in the preamble to the new European Union constitution.

Vatican officials said the vehicle that Benedict used to drive around St. Peter’s Square at the end of his inaugural Mass on Sunday and again at the audience was not the “popemobile” that was a trademark of John Paul’s reign but a modified all-terrain car with four-wheel drive, which can drive up the shallow steps of St. Peter’s Basilica.

General audiences, which are open to all pilgrims in Rome, began with Pope Pius XII, who received Allied soldiers after World War II. They became a weekly fixture with the first postwar Holy Year in 1950.

Wednesday’s audience was the first since Jan. 26. Audiences were suspended when John Paul was hospitalized Feb. 1 with serious breathing problems, which further impaired his ability to speak and led to fatal complications.

KRE/PH END POLK