Pope Benedict XVI has warned the young that a spiritual desert is spreading side by side with material prosperity in many societies, bringing with it inner emptiness, fear and despair. He was speaking to an estimated 400,000 worshippers at a Mass at Sydney's Randwick racecourse that concluded the 11th World Youth Day last Sunday.
Pope Benedict used the theme of the desert in a number of the addresses he gave during the four days of his public programme. He used it to describe the world's moral and spiritual health, and to voice the concerns of young people and many Australians over the climate change that has already brought severe drought to the region.
Speaking at Barangaroo at the start of his public appearances, the Pope contrasted the "wondrous" views of nature from his plane with the "scars which mark the surface of our earth" and also the degraded social environment.
For all the Pope's sober words, the 150,000 pilgrims waiting for him as he crossed Sydney Harbour by boat to Barangaroo gave him the greatest welcome for an individual on the harbour since a young Queen Elizabeth II was greeted by hundreds of thousands of spectators in February 1954. After the Mass he was greeted by thousands more people as his motorcade took a circuitous route through the streets of Sydney back to St Mary's Cathedral past many of the city's best-known sites.
On Saturday evening, he joined the 235,000 pilgrims who had walked to Randwick racecourse for a chilly overnight vigil and warned the young people against seeing themselves as cut off from the institution of the Church. "Unfortunately, the temptation to ‘go it alone' persists. Some today portray their local community as somehow separate from the so-called institutional Church, by speaking of the former as flexible and open to the Spirit and the latter as rigid and devoid of Spirit," he said.
At a final Mass the following day, Pope Benedict spoke of a "spiritual desert" aligned with material prosperity in many societies, producing "an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair". He called on the young people of the world to energise the Church and be "a new Upper Room" - akin to the first disciples - to proclaim the risen Christ to the world. "How many of our contemporaries have built broken and empty cisterns [a reference to abandoning faith in God from Jeremiah 2:13] in a desperate search for meaning - the ultimate meaning that only love can give?" the Pope asked.
The Pope's visit also included an official welcome last Thursday from civic authorities, including the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and the retiring Governor-General, Major General Michael Jeffery. He praised the Government for its "courageous decision" earlier this year to apologise to the country's indigenous peoples and for its commitment to care for the environment. Mr Rudd announced later that the former deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer, would be Australia's first ambassador specifically assigned to the Holy See, a post held until now jointly by the ambassador to the Irish Republic. The Pope also visited the north Sydney tomb of the first Australian to be beatified, Mother Mary MacKillop.