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Pope Benedict XVI to Visit Homeland Bavaria
Pope Benedict XVI will visit his native Germany in a six-day tour beginning Saturday, his second visit to his home country since his selection as pope in April 2005. This time Pope Benedict will visit his home state of Bavaria, and the entire region is in a state of joyous anticipation, even as cities and towns brace for considerable traffic and security restrictions. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and well-wishers are expected to the greet the pope as he rides in the famous “pope mobile” and leads a number of public services, with the largest expected to be the public mass on Sunday morning in Munich and another public service in Regensburg on Tuesday morning.
“The purpose of this visit is precisely because I want to see again the places where I grew up, the people who touched and shaped my life,” Pope Benedict said in a televised interview with German media and Vatican Radio on August 5. “I want to thank these people. Naturally, I also want to express a message that goes beyond my country, just as my ministry calls me to do.” Benedict will be will begin his visit in Munich, where he was a leading professor of theology before being named archbishop and then cardinal of Munich and Freising, serving from 1977 to 1982. He will also visit Regensburg, where he was also a professor of theology, and Freising, where he was ordained a priest in 1951 along with his older brother Georg. On one day set aside as private, Pope Benedict will spend time with his brother, who lives in Pentling, near Regensburg, in a house they own together. A much anticipated but brief part of the pope’s itinerary is a visit to tiny Marktl am Inn, where Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger was born and baptized in 1927 and where the house of his birth is to be turned into something of museum of his life story.
“I blush when I think of all the preparations that are made for my visit,” Pope Benedict said in the interview. “My house was freshly painted, a professional school redid the fence. The evangelical professor helped to do the fence…. I find all of this extraordinary, and I don’t think it’s for me, but rather a sign of wanting to be part of this faith community and to serve one another.” The people of Bavaria are all pulling together to give Benedict an unforgettable welcome to his Bavarian homeland, said Minister President Edmund Stoiber. Going further, he predicted that Germany would experience a strengthening of religious values through the pope’s visit, according to Zenit, a Catholic news agency. “We are all going to experience what the motto of the pope’s visit means: ‘He who believes is never alone.’” September 7, 2006 Links
Pope’s Visit Puts Germany in Spotlight
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