Pope warns of 'spiritual desert'

The Pope has urged young people to stay away from the "spiritual desert" he says is spreading across the world, at the end of his trip to Australia. July 21 2008

Pope Benedict XVI told a crowd of about 200,000 people at the Catholic Church's World Youth Day event that they should build a new age free from greed.

"In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading - an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair," he said in his homily.

He said God was asking young people to be "prophets for a new age" in which "hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deadens our souls and poisons our relationships".