In a three hour inauguration at the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI was officially sworn in as the spiritual leader for the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics and made a plea for humanity to return from the desert of suffering, embrace God and to work towards peace and goodness.

On Sunday April 24, three weeks after the death of John Paul, official dignitaries and an estimated 500,000 Catholic pilgrims crowded the Vatican to witness the ceremony that saw the church’s 265th successor to St Peter, the Apostle.

Pope Benedict, cloaked in traditional golden vestments, appealed to worshippers for their prayers to assist him in the “enormous task that truly exceeds human capacity”.

Benedict, a shy, retiring theological scholar, is known for his conservative and traditional moral stance on maters such as abortion, contraception and homosexuality. He faces the challenge of addressing the dwindling numbers and an ageing base in the West. In the developing world the Catholic Church faces growing competition from evangelical sects.

In his homily the German Pope, who once spent time in the Hitler Youth, repeated the promise he made on Wednesday April 20 to continue John Paul’s policy of reconciliation with the Jewish people and “believers and non-believers alike”.

However the heart of his first sermon, delivered entirely in Italian, was an impassioned cry for the world to return to spirituality. The Pope spoke of what he referred to as, a world of alienation and suffering, which had created a spiritual wasteland.

“There are so many kinds of desert. There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love,” he said.

The Catholic Church has long been concerned that consumerism and personal lifestyle choices have been taking precedence over faith.

Benedict also stressed that every single person mattered. “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary”.

The Pope also told the congregation, “all ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity”.

Like his Polish predecessor, Benedict grew up in and detested ideological extremes. Both men had an understanding of the irrationality of Nazism and spiritless communism, which repress faith and human freedom while advocating violence.

Among the 140 official delegations present for the inauguration were Germany’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, President Horst Koehler and George W Bush’s brother Governor Jeb Bush, a Roman Catholic who represented the US. The Pope’s elder brother Georg, 81, a priest, was also present.

According to The New York Times, on the Pope’s first official full day on Monday April 25, he said he hoped to improve and build upon dialogue between Muslims and Christians at local and international levels.

Some informatiojn from Reuters was used in this report.