Reuters: Pope urges respect for Sundays 09 September

Some 13,500 people packed the South Lawn of the White House on Wednesday to welcome Pope Benedict XVI. President George W. Bush welcomed the leader of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics on his historic visit to the United States and said America and the world need his "message of hope." Images and soundbites.

The Catholic Church celebrates January 1 as its World Day of Peace, and the Pope used a mid-morning mass and a window appearance before thousands of faithful in St. Peter's Square to mark the occasion. He also called on families to live in harmony and fraternal solidarity.

The pontiff also urged people in modern societies to accept the "light of Christ" and warned that many human tragedies are being caused by environmental upheavals.

As Jean-Paul IIs right hand man and most influential theological advisor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became known as ‘God’s Rottweiler’. Now, the world will know him as Pope Benedict XVI. But what will his pontificate be like?

It was the first meeting between a Pope and a Saudi monarch, custodian of two of Islam's holiest shrines. The Vatican wants greater rights for the some 1 million Catholics who live in the Saudi Arabia, most of them migrant workers who are not allowed to practice their religion in public. At the end of the meeting, the king gave the Pope a gold and silver sword studded with precious jewels, in keeping with a bedouin custom the Saudis follow when foreign leaders visit their country. The king also presented Benedict with a small silver and gold statue depicting a palm tree and a man riding a camel.

Pope Benedict XVI arrived at a baseball stadium here Thursday to celebrate mass with tens of thousands of Catholic faithful. Waving to the estimated crowd of 48,000 from his "pope-mobile," the pontiff did a lap of the new Washington Nationals stadium ahead of the first public mass of his six-day visit to the United States.

Pope Benedict XVI urged US Catholics to renew their faith and condemned the "tragic" sexual abuse of children by priests as he celebrated Mass before tens of thousands at a baseball stadium in the US capital on Thursday. Images and soundbite.

Pope Benedict XVI went out of his way to use a historic six-day visit to the United States to try to heal the wounds left by the sexual abuse scandal involving Catholic priests. An AFPTV report.

Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday berated US bishops for their poor handling of the child sex scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic church, but laid part of the blame on the breakdown of values in US society. Benedict told a gathering of bishops they had "sometimes very badly handled" the decades-old problem of pedophile priests. But he urged efforts "to address the sin of abuse within the wider context of sexual mores.