Pope urges world to find God

Pope Benedict laid bare his innermost thoughts on what he portrayed as a barren world yesterday in an inaugural homily that put the focus squarely on his quest for Christian spiritual revival.

In his new role as pastor of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope called the world a desert of suffering and a sea of alienation.

"The external deserts in the world are growing because the internal deserts have become so vast," Pope Benedict told world leaders and hundreds of thousands of pilgrims packed into St Peter's Square for a Mass inaugurating his papacy.

The Church has long worried that consumerism and personal lifetsyle choices are pulling people away from Catholicism and blinding people to their need for faith.

Pope Benedict takes over as leader of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics at a time when attendance is dwindling in the West and the Church is under pressure to bend its teachings to what he has called "the dictatorship of relativism".

The Pope, the Vatican's former overseer of orthodoxy as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is standing firm.

He said God's good gifts had been warped into instruments of pain by men who misused them in a selfish quest for power, leaving people empty and without hope.

"The earth's treasures no longer serve to build God's garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction," Pope Benedict said.

Only a living relationship with Jesus and abundant life in God would heal the pain of what the Pope called the deserts of poverty, hunger, thirst, abandonment, loneliness, destroyed love, a loss of God, of human dignity and of meaning to life.

"We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendour of God's light, into true life," he said.

He urged the faithful to join him in his mission of working for Christian unity and spreading the Gospel in a world of what he called "sheep lost in the desert".

The Vatican has already had cause to rail against liberal trends since Pope Benedict's election on Tuesday, condemning the initial approval in the Spanish Parliament last week of a bill that would legalise same-sex marriage.

Picking up on a catchphrase of his predecessor John Paul, "Do not be afraid", Pope Benedict warned people not to copy those who rejected Christ because they feared the sacrifices that adherence to Church teachings would entail.

"He (Christ) would certainly have taken something away from them: The dominion of corruption, the manipulation of law and the freedom to do as they pleased," Pope Benedict said.

"But he would not have taken away anything that pertains to human freedom or dignity, or to the building of a just society".

Pope Benedict told the crowds on St Peter's Square and millions more watching on television that every single person mattered.

"We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary".

The Pope reserved his final words for the world's youth, who had a close relationship with John Paul II, encouraging them not to fear being "deprived of freedom" if they followed the Church.

"When we give ourselves to (Christ), we receive a hundredfold in return," he said. "Open, open wide the doors to Christ and you will find true life".