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Pope urges young people to reject ‘spiritual desert’

Pope Benedict XVI urged young people yesterday to reject what he said was the “spiritual desert” spreading throughout the world and to use their faith to build a new age free from greed and materialism.

At a Mass before more than 200,000 young Roman Catholic pilgrims, Benedict said “the world needs renewal” and challenged them to be the agents of change.

“In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair,” the pontiff said during the final mass for World Youth Day.

The 81-year-old pope said it was up to a new generation of Christians to “build a world in which God’s gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished — not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed.”

The aim was “a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deadens our souls and poisons our relationships,” he said.

Yesterday’s mass wrapped up the church’s six-day festival in Sydney that has drawn massive crowds of pilgrims to Australia’s largest city, and has been watched on television by a global audience estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.

At the start of his last full day in the country, the pope flew by helicopter over hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who staged an all-night vigil at a race track ahead of the outdoor papal Mass which formally ended World Youth Day celebrations.

Some 200,000 young pilgrims camped out at the racetrack overnight, singing as temperatures dipped to about 8˚C. The crowd swelled to more than 300,000 as local residents flocked to the track on an overcast morning.

In a tribute to the region’s native peoples, a group of dancers from South Pacific island nations danced in front of the pope in straw clothing that was in stark contrast to his traditional red and gold vestments.

But the pope’s message to the young people was very traditional — they had to avoid “falsely conceived freedom” and look for that “underground river” of Christian values that will help them build their lives on firm foundations.

The 1.1 billion-member Catholic Church hopes World Youth Day, the brainchild of the late Pope John Paul II, will revitalize the world’s young Catholics at a time when the cult of the individual and consumerism have become big distractions in their lives.

The 81-year-old Benedict announced that the next World Youth Day will be in Madrid, Spain, in 2011 and that he hoped to be there.
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