The Church must be “poor and free” to be able to speak to contemporary humanity. Quoting his predecessor, Paul VI, during Mass celebrated in Brescia in the heart of the diocese where Pope Giovanni Battista Montini was born in 1897, Benedict XVI recalled the importance of the Church in the salvation of humanity and the need to establish a relationship of understanding and love with society.

Benedict XVI said that the Pope from Brescia devoted all his energies to a church as conformed to the Lord Jesus Christ as possible, so that in encountering it, modern man can meet Him, because we have an absolute need of Him. This is the basic desire of Vatican II.

Benedict XVI also emphasized that the encounter and dialogue between the Church and humanity of our time were particularly dear to the Servant of God Paul VI, who devoted his first encyclical “Ecclesiam Suam” to the Church. His reflections, added Pope Benedict, remain absolutely central today: the Church needs to deepen consciousness of herself, it needs to renew and purify herself by looking at the model that is Christ, and it must relate to the modern world. Issues such as the development of secularization and globalization, said Benedict XVI, make this necessity even more radical “in confronting forgetfulness of God, on the one hand, and non-Christian religions, on the other.”

On the road to Brescia, after landing at Ghedi, the Pope stopped in Botticino Sera to venerate the relics of Saint Arcangelo Tadini, whom he canonized April 26th this year and of whose teaching he recalled the need “to work for the emergence of a fraternal world in which everyone lives not for himself but for others.”