Germany gets ready to toast its favorite son

Mission: Save the church  
Now on his second trip home, Benedict hopes to re-energize the faith of his countrymen once again. “With all my heart, I want the visit to my homeland to reawaken the joy in Christianity,” Benedict wrote in a letter to a church paper, the Muenchner Kirchenzeitung.

The Catholic Church certainly has an uphill battle in its effort to “sell” a positive image and market the pope as a symbolic figure of freedom and religion in order to attract new and old believers.

But can modern image campaigns and pope merchandising really help stop the declining popularity of the Catholic Church? The fact is that Germany's Catholics, roughly equal in number to the country's Protestants, attend church less and less.

"I am surprised about the hype that surrounds our new pope," said Stephan Riedel, a 36-year old Catholic from Munich.

"It seems that many people have forgotten what Joseph Ratzinger has stood for in the past 25 years. But I am amazed how well the pope has handled this new balancing act," added Riedel, an administrator at a local brewery.

The youth are demanding a more modern church. Many young Catholics say that by holding on to the traditional image of the celibate male priest, church leaders are partly responsible for the catastrophic dearth of priests and the many pedophilia scandals. Many Germans also say the church's hierarchy discriminates against women and homosexuals, and that its rigid sexual morals put people off.

‘Benedict Superstar’
Yet, despite the often harsh criticism of the Catholic Church, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to flock to the streets when Benedict arrives in Munich on Saturday. His Mass on Sunday will likely attract more than a million pilgrims.

In Regensburg, one of the locations that Benedict will visit, organizers will shut down a five-mile highway stretch of the A3, one of Germany's main east-west transportation routes. For an entire day, the "autobahn" will be used as a parking lot for tourist buses.

German officials are spending millions to prepare for the visit — 5,000 policemen alone will be deployed across the country to protect the pope. The security preparations are comparable to those during the recent visit of President George Bush.

And, once again, the visit will be a gigantic media spectacle. German public broadcaster ARD alone will be sending more than 800 employees to cover the event. Other broadcasters have built outdoor studios and will use state-of-the-art broadcast technology to cover most of the events live.

All for "Benedict Superstar,” the headline Germany's FOCUS news magazine blared on its front page during his last visit to Germany.

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