Pope urges Australian youths to spurn materialism

At a Mass before more than 200,000 young Roman Catholic pilgrims in Sydney, Benedict said "the world needs renewal" and challenged them to be the agents of change.

"In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair," the pontiff said.

The 81-year-old pope said it was up to a new generation of Christians to build a world in "which God's gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished--not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed."

The aim was "a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deadens our souls and poisons our relationships," he said.

Sunday's Mass wraps up the church's six-day World Youth Day festival in Sydney that has drawn massive crowds to Australia's largest city, and has been watched on television by a global audience estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.

The Mass, delivered at a horse racetrack filled with pilgrims who had camped out overnight, comes a day after the pope made a forceful apology for the sexual abuse of children by Australia's Roman Catholic clergy. The apology is part of an effort that began in the United States to publicly atone for what he called evil acts by priests.

In his apology Saturday, Benedict said: "I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them as their pastor that I too share in their suffering," Benedict said in Sydney's St. Mary's Cathedral.

He said he wanted "to acknowledge the shame which we have all felt" and called for those responsible to be "brought to justice." The acts were "evil" and a "grave betrayal of trust," he said.

But the pope's apology was not enough to satisfy representatives of the victims of clergy sexual abuse, who said it must be backed by Vatican orders to Australian bishops to stop what they say are efforts to hide the extent of the problem and block survivors' attempts to win compensation.