Benedict Urges Dialogue Among Christians

Pope Benedict XVI helicoptered to southern Italy’s Adriatic coast Sunday and in his first Mass outside Rome made an impassioned plea for unity in the deeply divided world of Christianity.

Standing before a sparkling sea, Benedict received his most sustained applause when he pledged to work “with all my energy” toward rebuilding “full and visible unity with all the followers of Christ.”

“We cannot communicate with the Lord if we are not communicating among ourselves,” he told tens of thousands of followers gathered for the open-air celebration in the seaport of Bari. “I ask all of you to decisively take the path of spiritual ecumenism, which in prayer will open the door to the Holy Spirit, who alone can create unity.”

His comments echoed a theme that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has emphasized since his election to the papacy on April 19. As enforcer of church doctrine for nearly a quarter of a century, Ratzinger said other religions, including Christian denominations, were inferior. But since becoming pope, he has made a concerted effort to reach out to other faiths and promote interreligious dialogue.

And though that outreach has included the Anglican Communion, other Protestant churches and Jews, the homily was especially directed at Eastern Orthodoxy and efforts to heal the 1,000-year-old schism between it and Roman Catholicism.

Bari, which looks east toward the Balkans, long has been regarded as a bridge between East and West. It is the final resting place of the bones of St. Nicholas of Myra, the 4th century bishop revered by Catholics and Orthodox alike as the patron of Russia, Sicily and Greece.

Archbishop Francesco Cacucci of Bari, greeting Benedict, said the St. Nicholas relics constituted an East-West connection that “neither time nor divisions have ever demolished.”

The pope praised Bari as a “land of meeting and dialogue” with Eastern Orthodoxy and called on the faithful not to allow the “woodworm of resentment” to destroy the soul. Instead, he said, Christians will have to move past old conflicts and open their hearts to mutual understanding and forgiveness.

The inability of the late John Paul II to make amends with Eastern churches was seen as one of his failures and a matter of great personal disappointment to the Polish-born pontiff. Especially in Russia, Orthodox leaders are mistrustful of the Vatican, and have accused the Catholic church of attempting to convert their followers.

Benedict’s first trip outside Rome -- except for a brief visit to Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer home south of the capital -- was seen as a test of how he would perform on the road. He also wanted to make clear his intention to follow his predecessor’s example. The popular John Paul was the most-traveled pope in history. At 78, however, Benedict’s journeys are likely to be less extensive.

Sunday’s trip lasted about three hours. The real test lies ahead, when Benedict makes his first foreign pilgrimage, to a World Youth Day conference in his native Germany in August.

In Bari, the pope’s appearance officially concluded the weeklong 24th annual Italian National Eucharistic Congress, a conference of study and worship for priests, seminarians and others. The Eucharist, or Holy Communion, is a sacrament based on Jesus’ Last Supper and central to most Christian worship. In contrast to many other Christian denominations, Catholicism holds that the consecrated wafer and wine are the actual body and blood of Christ, rather than symbols.

Benedict stressed the fundamental importance of this belief as well as the urgent need to retain Sunday as a day of spiritual reflection, part of the Vatican’s campaign to revive Christianity in increasingly secular Europe.

“The Christ that we find through the sacrament is the same here in Bari as in Rome, here in Europe as in America, in Africa, in Oceania,” he said. “He is the only and same Christ who is present in the Eucharistic bread of every place on Earth.... The Eucharist ... is the sacrament of unity.”

As the pope spoke, an aide used an umbrella to shield him from the sun, and several cardinals wore sunglasses with their miters and vestments. Benedict presided over the Mass from an amphitheater painted in robin’s-egg blue with an abstract representation of the Host, the consecrated communion wafer, as a backdrop.

Security was tight in Bari. Traffic was closed in parts of the city and private vessels were banned from sailing near the seaside site of the Mass. Members of the papal Swiss Guard, in their striped uniforms, stood at attention near the altar.

After landing in a helicopter in Bari, Benedict traveled to Sunday’s ceremony in the familiar bulletproof “popemobile.” On his way home to the Vatican, Benedict’s helicopter swooped low over the southern town of Duronia so the pope could bless residents gathered in a soccer field there, the Italian news agency Ansa reported. Apparently, Duronia was the helicopter pilot’s hometown.