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BERLIN: Germans opposed to Pope Benedict's conservative views on sexuality and angry at cases of abuse by priests protested in Berlin on Thursday at the start of his four-day visit to his homeland, where record numbers have quit the Catholic Church.
The German-born pope said before landing he understood why some were “scandalised by these crimes” and had left the Church.
He used a biblical image of Jesus the fisherman to say: “The Church is a net of the Lord that pulls in good fish and bad fish.”
But the 84-year-old pope's words at the start of his third and toughest papal tour of Germany failed to soothe protesters gathering in Berlin ahead of his speech to the Bundestag lower house of parliament, and mass for 70,000 at the Olympic Stadium.
“This is impossibly arrogant, it shows he is not of this world,” said 62-year-old Birk Friedrich, who spent the first 14 years of his life in a Catholic children's home where he said violent abuse was rife.
“It was the Church and this pope who allowed all of the abuse to be swept under the carpet,” said Friedrich in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, where the banners included one reading “Better God without a Church than a Church without God.”
Gay and lesbian groups opposed to Benedict's dogmatic views on sexuality and contraception thronged the square, some dressed as bishops or even the pope.
“Why has he been invited to parliament? He has nothing to do with politics. His policies on condoms are as good as murder,”
said Markus Schuke, a 42-year-old working for and AIDs charity.
In a country rocked by the clerical sex scandals sweeping across Europe in the past two years, a record 181,000 people quit the Church last year, for the first time more than the number of Protestants leaving their churches and of baptisms into the Catholic Church.
Benedict noted this exodus and urged Catholics not to quit the Church as it worked to undo the harm done.
The Church in Germany has received almost 600 requests for compensation for victims of sexual and physical abuse, while a victims' association estimates that more than 2,000 people were mistreated by Catholic priests in recent decades.
