Religion vs materialism

More than 50,000 people waving Czech, Slovak, German and Vatican flags joined Pope Benedict XVI in an open-air mass at the pilgrimage site to St Wenceslas at Stara Boleslav, just outside of Prague. The pontiff told believers that the fall of the communist regime - which brutally tried to erase religion - was proof that God could not be excluded from public life and that a life without God would not satisfy them.

"The true value of human life is measured not merely in terms of material goods and transient interests... it is not material goods that quench the profound thirst for meaning and happiness in the heart of every person," he said.

The main aim of the pontiff's pastoral trip was to restore faith in the ex-communist, largely secular country where less than one-third of the population is Catholic.

Pope bows to skull St Wenceslas

Before celebrating Monday's mass, the pope visited the Saint Wenceslas Basilica where he paid homage to the saint's skull on the anniversary of his murder on Sept. 28 in 935 AD. The 82-year-old pontiff said the fate of the Czech patron saint to demonstrated the relevance of faith in a secular society.

Benedict said that Wenceslas, a 10th-century Czech duke who promoted Christianity in the Czech lands, could serve as a role model for today's young Catholics who are trying to keep their faith in an increasingly secular world.

"Wenceslas died as a martyr for Christ," Benedict said. "By killing him, his brother Boleslav succeeded in taking possession of the throne of Prague, but the crown placed on the heads of his successors does not bear his name but the name of Wenceslas."

Over 100,000 turn out

The highlight of the papal visit was an outdoor mass on Sunday attended by around 130,000 people on an airfield in Brno, the Czech Republic's second-largest city.

On Saturday, day one of his trip, the pontiff met Czech President Vaclav Klaus and other top politicians in Prague and gave an evening mass. Benedict also met with Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright and initiator of the 1989 Velvet Revolution who spent years in prison before becoming president after the fall of communism.

Not all aims achieved

It was the Benedict's first visit to the Czech Republic as pope, and the head of the Roman Catholic Church's second-ever trip to a central European nation since the collapse of communism in 1989. The pope visited Poland in 2006.

His trip to the Czech Republic failed to deal with the thorny issue that, nearly 20 years after communism fell and religious freedom was restored, the state has yet to compensate the Catholic Church for property seized during four decades of communist rule.

The German-born pope did not visit the country's western Sudeten region, which was once mostly inhabited by ethnic Germans, who were driven from their homes and fled to Germany and Austria after World War II.

wl/AFP/AP/dpa
Editor: Andreas Illmer