Benedict, delivering his Christmas Day address from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, urged the crowd to rejoice over the celebration of Christ's birth, which he hoped would bring consolation to all people "who live in the darkness of poverty, injustice, and war."
In violence-ridden Baghdad, venturing out in large numbers late at night is still unthinkable, so the Iraqi capital's Christians celebrated midnight Mass in the middle of the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Yesterday about 2,000 went out to the Mar Eliya Church in the east of Baghdad where Iraq's Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly, leader of the ancient Chaldean Catholic Church, celebrated Mass.
He told the congregation that Iraq is "a bouquet of flowers of different colors, each color represents a religion or ethnicity but all of them have the same scent."
He congratulated Muslims for their Eid al-Adha holiday, falling near Christmas, and Muslim clerics - both Sunni and Shi'ite - attended in a sign of unity.
"May Iraq be safe every year, and may our Christian brothers be safe every year," Shi'ite cleric Hadi al-Jazail told AP Television News outside the church. "We came to celebrate with them and to reassure them. . . . This national gathering is beautiful against the sectarian fighting, and God willing from this lesson we'll all pray for peace."
Christian pilgrims in Bethlehem filled the ancient Church of the Nativity, waiting in line to see the grotto that marks the traditional birthplace of Jesus.
The large numbers and the cacophony of languages was evidence that more visitors were there this year than in the past several years.
The outbreak of the Palestinian uprising against Israel in late 2000 and the fighting that followed had clouded Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem for years.
Kiel Tilley, 23, a science teacher from Charlevoix, Mich., said the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at a US-sponsored conference last month reassured him before his trip to Bethlehem. "The peace process made me feel safer."
The experience, he said, was "very powerful and meaningful to me. . . . It's very moving to visit a place which I always read about in the Bible."
