“John Paul II had said: Open you doors to Christ, open them wide. While this Pope’s motto is: Open your ears to God". With this wisecrack of a journalist, Ludwig Ring-Eifel, director of Kna (Katholische Nachrichten-Agentur), the German Catholic press agency, sums up the leitmotiv of Benedict XVI’s speeches in Germany. As he outlined the first balance, in an interview with SIR, of the Pontiff’s visit (on line from tonight at: old.agensir.it), Ring-Eifel states that "the Pope’s words" about deafness to God "have opened the ears also of those who are not used to listening to homilies or theological speeches”. “People’s reception he goes on has been very warm” and even the lay press has given "a more balanced and clearer opinion”. The event received wide media coverage: nearly full coverage was offered "by some TV stations". Significant, according to the director of Kna, as well as the "response" of the young, have been "the Pope’s directions on a reasonable dialogue with Islam, for instance, when he repeated in Munich that other people’s sacredness must be respected”, which “open a new perspective in the relation with Muslims. In this area, the German Government is still looking for a new way of dialoguing and communicating”; perhaps “from the Pope’s visit comes a new idea for a dialogue" that goes "beyond the purely technical and juridical one".
