Austria:Pope Benedict has said that an increasingly secular Europe still needs "the truth of Catholicism" and has urged a return to a "Christian" Sunday.
During his three-day visit to Austria, the German pontiff said the resignation towards religion "lies at the heart of the crisis in the West, the crisis of Europe".
"Sunday has been transformed in our Western societies into the weekend, into leisure time, something good and necessary in the mad rush of the modern world," said Pope Benedict in a homily yesterday in Vienna's St Stephen's Cathedral.
"Yet if leisure time lacks an inner focus, an overall sense of direction, then ultimately it becomes wasted time . . . Leisure time requires a focus - the encounter with him who is our origin and goal."
His call yesterday for a revival of Christian faith, greeted with applause, ran through all of his public statements during his Austrian visit. The highlight of the trip was a visit on Saturday to the pilgrimage shrine at Mariazell, celebrating its 850th anniversary.
There he welcomed a rained-out crowd of around 40,000 from Austria, Hungary and Slovakia as a "creative minority" in an increasingly secular society, a group which will lead the revival of a more unified Catholic Church.
In his homily, the pope acknowledged but did not accept the criticism of other church leaders of the Vatican for saying Catholicism is the one true faith.
"This does not mean that we despise other religions, nor are we arrogantly absolutising our own ideas," he said. "Rather we are gripped by Him who has touched our hearts and who has lavished gifts upon us so that we may in turn present these to others." During the trip, Pope Benedict attacked abortion, describing the right to life as "the fundamental human right, the presupposition of every other right".