It wasn’t perhaps the start he would have wanted. As Pope Benedict XVI emerged from his plane yesterday at Cologne airport, the wind immediately whipped off his white cap. He briefly considered whether to retrieve it. He decided not to bother and, hatless, descended the steps on to German soil.
As hundreds of young pilgrims greeted him with a Mexican wave, the Pope faced further embarrassment when his cape billowed over his face.
But the Holy Spirit — as German TV commentators were quick to point out — sometimes moves in mysterious ways. Four months after his election as Pope, the 78-year-old former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger arrived in his native Germany on Thursday for his first trip abroad as pontiff.
He had come to visit World Youth Day — a six-day gathering attended by 400 000 young Catholics from across the world. It is too early to say what kind of papacy Benedict XVI will pursue during his time on — as he put it — ”the chair of St Peter”.
But on Thursday there were a few clues. Instead of kissing the ground on his arrival, as Pope John Paul II famously used to do, Pope Benedict merely walked a little nervously down the red carpet.
”With deep joy I find myself for the first time after my election to the chair of St Peter in my beloved homeland, in Germany,” he said in his first address in his homeland. ”I thank God who has enabled me to begin my pastoral visits outside Italy with this visit to the nation of my birth,” he added.
”That so many people have come to meet the successor of Peter is a sign of the church’s vitality,” he went on.
Benedict is a more diffident, professorial figure than his charismatic predecessor, whose giant picture over-shadowed the square next to Cologne’s vast Gothic cathedral.
‘This is a quieter Pope,’ Holzer Florian (30) who was waiting for Benedict to drive past on his way to the Archbishop of Cologne’s residence. ”I’m from the same area of Upper Bavaria. ‘You have to remember that we Bavarians are conscious of our traditions.”
But this did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the tens of thousands of pilgrims, who broke into football style chants of ”Ben-e-detto”.
Later, the Pope went on an afternoon cruise down the Rhine. Shortly after setting off, his boat stopped close to the bank where thousands of flag-waving pilgrims had gathered in shimmering meadows and he addressed the crowds from across the water in German, English, French and Italian.
His message was an inclusive one — that God was not just there for those who already believed in him, but also for those who hadn’t found him yet or weren’t baptised.
The Pope is due to reinforce this ecumenical theme when he visits a synagogue in Cologne, becoming only the second Pope ever to venture into a Jewish place of worship.
He is also due to meet Muslim leaders, as well as German politicians who are desperate for all the votes they can get ahead of next month’s general election. The Pope’s four-day visit reaches its climax on Sunday when he will lead an open-air mass in a field.
Not everyone was delighted by the Pope’s presence at World Youth Day, an event inaugurated 20 years ago by John Paul II to bring the church nearer to young Catholics. Critics constructed a carnival float depicting Benedict as a dinosaur, dragging behind him a flock of sheep.
”He seems a bit old,” Michael Keaveney (17) from New Jersey, said. ”I don’t know if he will have an easy time connecting with us. John Paul II was in his 50s or early 60s when he started his papacy.”
Others took issue with Benedict’s apparent hardline stance on gay relationships.
”I’m here to show that I don’t believe that homosexuality is a sin,” Christine Classen (19) who was wearing a T-shirt with two linked female symbols, said. ”I love someone. I don’t love a sex.”
Someone, meanwhile, had added a pair of Dracula fangs to one of many Benedict posters. But for most people, Thursday was a chance to catch a glimpse of the world’s most famous religious figure.
Many pilgrims nodded off in the fierce afternoon sunshine next to crash barriers, as they waited for Benedict to go by on an early-evening tour of the city in his Pope mobile. Others sang or waved their flags.
In an interview before arriving in Germany — a country he has not lived in for 23 years — the Pope said that Europe had plunged into ”self-pity”.
One of the key missions of his papacy appears to be a desire to return the ”old continent” — as he calls it — to its Christian roots, at a time when the number of believers going to church is dwindling. – Guardian Unlimited Â