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Pope says West puts too much faith in science

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-8/1157950092116050.xml&coll=1

Pope says West puts too much faith in science
Monday, September 11, 2006
BY PHILIP PULLELLA AND MADELINE CHAMBERS
REUTERS

MUNICH -- Western societies are losing their souls to scientific
rationality and frightening believers in the developing world who still
fear God, Pope Benedict told an open-air Mass in Germany yesterday.

Benedict -- on the second day of a visit to his native Bavaria-- said
that spreading the word of Jesus Christ was more important than all the
emergency and development aid that rich churches like those in Germany
gave to poor countries.

He also stressed the role of faith in fighting AIDS "by realistically
facing its deeper causes," indirectly confirming the Church view that
pre-marital abstinence and fidelity in marriage are the way to combat
sexually transmitted diseases.

About 250,000 faithful -- many of them families with children --
gathered at the fairground for the Mass. "I've been here since five
o'clock in the morning," said Ker stin Gessert, 32, from Karlsruhe. "I
think it's important that he has come."

Wearing green and white vestments, the pope addressed the crowd from a
platform covered by a white canopy.

Some in the crowd wore traditional Bavarian folk dress and sat down to
picnics of sausages and bread after the service.

"Social issues and the Gospel are inseparable," said the pope. "When we
bring people only knowledge, ability, technical competence and tools, we
bring them too little," he said, hammering away at his central concern
that secularisation and materialism have replaced faith in Western
thinking.

Later, Benedict, 79, who has hinted the visit to his home region could
be his last, led vespers at the Cathedral Of Our Lady in Munich where he
served as archbishop from 1977 to 1982.

The twin green onion domes make the cathedral one of the city's
best-known landmarks. Completed in 1488, it is Bavaria's largest church
and has served as the cathedral for the archbishops of Mu nich and
Freising since 1821.

Inside, the pope, clad in glitter ing vestments of green, silver and
gold, smiled broadly as young girls in first communion dresses and with
flowers in their hair greeted him.

On his six-day trip, Benedict will also visit his birthplace at Marktl
am Inn, the shrine to the Virgin Mary at Altoetting and Re gensburg,
where he taught theology from 1969 to 1977.

Police said the bright yellow house where the pope was born in Marktl am
Inn, and which he was due to visit on Monday, was splashed overnight
with two bags of blue paint by vandals.

At the morning Mass, Benedict said Western societies had become "hard of
hearing" about God, saying: "There are too many other frequencies in our
ears. What is said about God strikes us as pre- scientific, no longer
suited for our age."

He contrasted this to a faith he still found in developing countries,
where 70 percent of the world's Catholics now live.

"People in Africa and Asia admire our scientific and technical prowess,
but at the same time they are frightened by a form of rationality which
totally excludes God from man's vision, as if this were the highest form
of reason," he said.


/end


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Pope says West puts too much faith in science

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-8/1157950092116050.xml&coll
=1

Pope says West puts too much faith in science
Monday, September 11, 2006
BY PHILIP PULLELLA AND MADELINE CHAMBERS
REUTERS

MUNICH -- Western societies are losing their souls to scientific
rationality and frightening believers in the developing world who still
fear God, Pope Benedict told an open-air Mass in Germany yesterday.

MUNICH -- Western societies are losing their souls to scientific
rationality

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-8/1157950092116050
.xml&coll=1

Pope says West puts too much faith in science
Monday, September 11, 2006
BY PHILIP PULLELLA AND MADELINE CHAMBERS
REUTERS

MUNICH -- Western societies are losing their souls to scientific
rationality and frightening believers in the developing world who
still fear God, Pope Benedict told an open-air Mass in Germany
yesterday.