Pope Benedict XVI and Angela Merkel

"LandepNews"

Pope Benedict XVI and Angela Merkel

Pope Benedict XVI begins on Thursday a four-day visit to Germany, his homeland, and plans for the first day of the trip to address to the Parliament in Berlin, to hold talks with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and an audience with the president Christian Wulff, concluding the day with a Mass he will hold on Berlin’s Olympic Stadium for a crown of 70,000 people.
Then the pope is going to visit Erfurt and Freiburg and visit the former Chancellor Helmut Kohl. On September 25 he plans to return to Rome.
His address to the Lower House of the Parliament could be boycotted by lawmakers, including the leader of the Green Party, who said that the Pope was “honored” in a fashion denied to other religious leaders.
The hostility he faces this time shows that his visit will be different from the visit six years ago, when he was received by hundreds of thousands and sailed on the Rhine River all the way to Cologne.
The Pope mentioned in an interview on September 18 that his trip was not a show neither was it a tourist venture, but rather a “moving of God back into our field vision.”
Gay and lesbian will also be among those who will protest the arrival of the Pope to his homeland. They protest against the teaching of the church on homosexuality, contraception and marriage, all founded in Scripture’s teachings. In Berlin their action will be encouraged by the the fact that Berlin’s mayor is a gay person.
In a statement welcoming to the pope on September 17, chancellor Merkel said that the Christian values are to be called up in an era where secularization advances.
While in Berlin, the pope will seek dialogue with other religions, namely with the representatives of the Muslim religion, with whom he will meet in Berlin tomorrow before leaving for Erfurt, the place where the Reformation began in the 16th century.
He must be very careful this time, since last time he spoke about Muslims in Germany, in 2006, he equated Muslim faith with violence, which triggered a wave of protests throughout the Muslim world.
In Erfurt he will visit the Augustinian monastery where Martin Luther completed his education. There, he will meet with different members of the Protestant denominations.
The pope seems to face demonstrations against him even in his native land, after he was received with violent clashes in Madrid last month, as he attended the International Youth Day.
In Madrid, the people protested against the estimated costs of the visit at such a shortage time for the Iberian country. The gays and lesbians also made their protest against God and the teachings the pope is teaching on his behalf. However, there were hundreds of thousands of Spaniards who treasured the visit of their spiritual supreme leader and showed it, from the royal family to the people in the streets.

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Now, the pope is expected some 10,000 Germans to protest against him, but he said in the plane that the protests are acceptable as long as they remain civil.
He comes to Germany after lifting, two weeks ago, the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson, a bishop that had been expelled from the church for denying the Holocaust. Merkel criticized the papal decision at the time, saying that it was not clearly motivated.
The pope will also have to face the wrath of the families of the children who were abused by the priests.
This is a situation that shook the very foundations of the Catholic church, and prompted some human rights activists to launch a request by the International Criminal Court to hold the pope and several highly-ranked officials in Vatican accountable for consorting and conspiring to cover crimes against humanity.
It is believed that it would be difficult to demonstrate that the Roman Catholic Church has acted like a terror organization, planning to aggress the little children all over the world.
It is also going to be difficult to prove that the priests all over the world worked in a conspiracy against the little children, other than the conspiracy of the sin they all share in.
Vatican is not a member state of the accord on which the ICC was founded in 2002, but the pope is still a German citizen, and that could bring him before judges, if the action goes any further, placing him among the world criminals like Muammar al-Qaddafi, Omar al-Bashir, Milosevic, and others.
This only shows the scope of this tragedy that had its victims in Germany too, which will make pope’s mission in his homeland even harder. One of his first statements on German soil was admission of that “bad fish” also existed in the Catholic church, but that that was no reason for the people to miss the encounter with God within this Church.

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