TIMES ONLINE: An estimated 120,000 church followers waited yesterday for the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI at an airfield in the southern Czech city of Brno, the centre of the country’s Roman Catholic heartland.
Although the Vatican had said that it was hoping for as many as 200,000, it is expected to be the largest turnout of the Pope’s three-day trip to the overwhelmingly secular Czech Republic.
Speaking next to a 12m steel cross, the 82-year-old pontiff warned that modern societies excluded God at their peril. “History has demonstrated the absurdities to which man descends when he excludes God from the horizon of his choices and actions,” he said, adding that technical progress was not enough to “guarantee the moral welfare of society”. >>> Foreign Staff | Monday, September 28, 2009
