Vatican City, May 17, 2010 / 17:52 pm
On Sunday, the Holy Father was greeted by a massive amount of supporters at the Vatican for the Regina Coeli. Church prelates chalked the enormous response up to a great love of the Pope and his commitment to ridding the Catholic Church of sin.
After leading the Marian prayer from the window of his apartment above the supportive crowd, the Holy Father told the faithful that we must "be strongly rooted in God, solid in the good, in love and in service" to combat the sin within the Church and in the rest of the world.
Paola Dal Toso is the president of the national association of lay groups that organized the initiative of support for the Pope and mobilized the army that descended on the Vatican for the Sunday noon prayer. She said before the occasion that the idea of the event was to bring themselves "visibly around Benedict XVI as sons with their father, desiring to sustain him in his challenging ministry, expressing affection and gratitude to him for his passion for Christ and for all of humankind."
Speaking with Vatican Radio after a meeting with the Holy Father in audience on Monday morning, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, head of the Italian bishops said that Pope Benedict was "very content, very serene, for having seen this manifestation of such joy, closeness" in an "extremely packed" St. Peter's Square.