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Pope ends trip with youth mass

COLOGNE, Germany, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- Pope Benedict XVI celebrated an open-air mass for a congregation of a million people Sunday as he ended a trip to Germany.

Most of those in the crowd were young people who had spent the night camped in a field outside Cologne, the New York Times reported. The pope and 800 bishops marked the end of the Roman Catholic Church's World Youth Day celebration with the mass.

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The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's visit to his native country was his first trip abroad since his elevation. The pope also met with Muslims living in Germany and attended a service in a Jewish synagogue.

In his homily, delivered in five languages, Benedict told young people that they should not just pick what they want from religion, warning that an apparent explosion of spirituality has been accompanied by "a strange forgetfulness of God."

"I have no wish to discredit all the manifestations of this phenomenon," he said. "There may be sincere joy in the discovery. Yet, if it is pushed too far, religion becomes almost a consumer product."

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