VIENNA - German-born Pope Benedict on Friday said the Roman Catholic Church wanted to show "repentance" for what happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust in which the Nazis killed some 6 million of them.
The use of such a strong and specific term by the pope, who arrived for a three-day visit to Austria on Friday, was the latest in a series of occasions on which church leaders said the church should seek forgiveness for offences against Jews and come to terms with religious roots of anti-semitism.
Benedict will visit at a monument at Vienna's Judenplatz, commemorating the 65,000 Austrian Jews killed by the Nazis.
The leader of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics said he wanted his visit to the memorial to show "our sadness, our repentance, our friendship with our Jewish brothers."
In 1998 the local Church put a plaque on a nearby building reading: "Today, Christianity regrets its share in responsibility for the persecution of Jews and realises its failure."
The silent prayer at Judenplatz is Benedict's latest clear commitment to combating anti-semitism and followed a visit to the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in Poland last year, where he asked why God remained silent when millions of people, mostly Jews, were murdered there.
The Pope himself served briefly in the Hitler Youth during the war when membership in the Nazi paramilitary organisation was compulsory, although he was never a member of the Nazi party and his family opposed Hitler's regime.
POURING RAIN
Upon his arrival in Vienna, Benedict was greeted with military honours and welcomed by Austrian President Heinz Fischer and members of government, although celebrations had to be moved indoors into a hangar due to strong rain.
The main purpose of Benedict's trip is to visit the 850-year old shrine of Mariazell on Saturday where some 33,000 pilgrims including 70 cardinals are expected to join him. He will cap the visit with a Mass in Vienna's 13th century St Stephen's Cathedral on Sunday.
His visit of the predominantly Catholic country will also underscore the problems of a national church which has been debilitated by internal dissent, dwindling church attendance and that found itself living in the shadow of sexual abuse scandals.
In the 1990s, a sex abuse scandal forced the late archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, to retire after allegations that he had molested a schoolboy 20 years earlier. In 2004, the bishop of St Poelten resigned after a scandal involving pornographic pictures at a seminary.
"I hope that I still can help in the healing of these wounds," Benedict told reporters, adding that he wanted "to say thank you to all those who suffered in these past years". He also praised those "who, in a Church of sinners, nonetheless recognised the faith of Christ."
In his chat with reporters aboard the plane, the Pope said he wanted his trip to remind people in a Europe where religious participation has been diminishing that "a life without God does not succeed."
He added: "In the end (life without God) makes everything relative to the point that good and evil are no longer distinguishable."
