Benedict vows to mend rift with Orthodox church

BARI, Italy -- Pope Benedict XVI made his first trip outside Rome since his election as head of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics and took the opportunity yesterday to emphasize two issues he has made clear will be fundamental to his mission: Christian unity and resistance to materialism and increasing secularism.

Before 200,000 people gathered under a blazing sun, Benedict made a pledge to ''work with all my energy" toward healing divisions among Christians, while urging the Christian faithful to move beyond old resentments.

All Christians, he said, face the common challenge of living in a world marked by ''unbridled consumerism, religious indifference, and secularism closed to transcendence."

The thousands of people, some of whom had been waiting since early morning, were ready to welcome the new pope, who is six weeks into his papacy. But many were also assessing his approach and style, and comparisons with his predecessor, John Paul II, were inevitable.

Benedict arrived by helicopter for the three-hour visit. As John Paul did for years before his illness made it impossible, Benedict took a quick spin in the white popemobile, waving to the crowd with the windows rolled down.

The many young people gathered interrupted him occasionally with their singsong chants of ''Be-ne-detto! Be-ne-detto!"

The occasion was the concluding Mass for the weeklong Eucharistic Congress, during which Italian bishops and the faithful discussed the meaning of Holy Communion and the importance of Sunday as a day of worship and reflection.

In his homily he settled into a familiar role: as a teacher. In a professorial style that pope-watchers are getting to know, he slowly and clearly explained the difficulties the first Christians faced with persecution by Roman emperors. ''Even without imperial vetoes," he said, bringing home the lesson, ''it's not easy for us either to live as Christians," who in contemporary society sometimes find a spiritual ''desert."

Periodically looking over his reading glasses and adding comments to his written text, he put his call to Christian unity into historical context. He called Bari ''the land of encounter and dialogue with our Christian brothers of the East" and recalled that St. Nicholas of Myra, a fourth-century saint from what is now Turkey and who is loved by both the Western and Orthodox churches, is buried here.

Orthodox Christians split from the rest of the church in 1054 in what is known as the Great Schism.

Expectations of a stern taskmaster, born of Benedict's reputation as a tough enforcer of Catholic dogma after his 24 years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, have been put on hold by many Catholics; his shy smile and welcoming demeanor in his public appearances have come as a surprise.

''As a cardinal he was a German, rigid and categorical," said a 60-year-old pensioner from nearby Castellana Grotte who identified himself only as Antonino. ''Now he's different, in his expressions and his behavior. Before he didn't speak, and now he does in a very accessible way," he said. ''Let's let him pontificate."