The Pope prayed that Christians would respond to the problem by growing in faith
-- From "Pope's Good Friday message warns of drift into a 'desert of godlessness'" by Stephen Adams, [London] Telegraph 4/11/09
Speaking during the Way of the Cross procession at the Colosseum in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI said that "religious sentiments" were increasingly ranked among the "unwelcome leftovers of antiquity" and held up to scorn and ridicule.
He used this year's Good Friday meditations at the Stations of the Cross to compare attempts to purge religion from public life to the mockery Jesus Christ faced from the mob as he was led out to be crucified.
Speaking at the seventh Station of the Cross, where Jesus is made an "object of fun", he said: "We are shocked to see to what levels of brutality human beings can sink. Jesus is humiliated in new ways even today. When things that are most holy and profound in the faith are being trivialised, the sense of the sacred is allowed to erode.
"Everything in public life risks being desacralised: persons, places, pledges, prayers, practices, words, sacred writings, religious formulae, symbols, ceremonies.
"Our life together is being increasingly secularised. Religious life grows diffident. Thus we see the most momentous matters placed among trifles, and trivialities glorified.
"Values and norms that held societies together and drew people to higher ideals are laughed at and thrown overboard. Jesus continues to be ridiculed!"
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