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SYDNEY: Pope Benedict XVI warned hundreds of thousands of young
Catholics Thursday of the perils of pop culture and pillaging the
earth’s resources after a rapturous welcome at the world’s
biggest Christian festival.
Speaking against the spectacular backdrop of
Sydney’s famous harbor, the Pontiff told pilgrims in Australia for
World Youth Day that “something is amiss” in modern society.
“Our world has grown weary of greed,
exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and
piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises,” the Pope
said after a welcoming ceremony by Aborigines in tribal paint.
The Pope told the vast mass of youths from
around the world, gathered under a sea of national flags at
Barangaroo wharf, that humanity was squandering the earth’s
resources to satisfy its insatiable appetite for material goods.
In one of his strongest messages on the
environment, Pope Benedict spoke poetically of his long flight from
Rome to Australia, saying the wondrous views from his plane evoked a
profound sense of awe.
But the 81-year-old Pontiff told his youthful
audience that the planet’s problems were also easier to perceive
from the sky.
“Perhaps reluctantly, we come to acknowledge
that there are scars which mark the surface of our earth—erosion,
deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean
resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption,” he said.
Earlier, ecstatic Catholics mingled with curious
office workers as hundreds of thousands of people lined Sydney’s
famous harbor to watch the Pope sail into an adoring welcome.
The Pope’s “boat-a-cade”, a flotilla of 13
vessels led by a water-spouting fire tug and flanked by bodyguards
on jet skis, glided past Sydney’s iconic Opera House and Harbor
Bridge en route to his World Youth Day debut.
Pope Benedict arrived in Sydney on Sunday but
took a four-day holiday before beginning his formal duties, which
end with a Papal Mass expected to be attended by 500,000 people on
Sunday.
Ahead of his public appearance, he was welcomed
by Governor-General Michael Jeffery, the representative of
Australia’s head of state, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, and
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
In a brief speech at the ceremony at Sydney’s
Government House, the Pontiff hailed Rudd’s apology to Aborigines
for past injustices in an historic address to parliament in
February.
“Thanks to the Australian government’s
courageous decision to acknowledge the injustices committed against
the indigenous peoples in the past, concrete steps are now being
taken to achieve reconciliation based on mutual respect,” the Pope
said.
-- AFP
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