SYDNEY (New York Times) — In his final address to hundreds of thousands of young Catholics gathered in Australia on Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI attacked the violence and materialism of the modern age, and called on his audience to build a “new age.”

“A new generation of Christians is being called to help build a world in which God’s gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished — not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed,” he told a congregation of about 400,000 gathered at a Sydney race track and neighboring park.
He sought “a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deaden our souls and poison our relationships,” he told the audience, which included 26 cardinals and more than 400 bishops.
Sunday’s Mass was the culmination of six days of public and private events of World Youth Day, which the Roman Catholic Church says is the largest gathering of young people on the planet. The pope has used the event as a forum to call for religion to be returned to the center of the moral universe; for Catholicism to return to its evangelistic roots; and for a united front, both among Christians and among the world’s religions, in the face of a world becoming ever more materialistic.
“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,” he warned.
The event, which happens every three or four years, is scheduled to be held next in Madrid in 2011.