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Pope Benedict, marking the eighth Christmas season of his pontificate, celebrated a solemn Christmas Eve mass in St Peter's Basilica, during which he appealed for a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and an end to the civil war in Syria.
At the Mass for some 10,000 in the basilica and broadcast to millions of others on television, the pope wove his homily around the theme of God's place in today's modern world.
"Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for him," said the pope, wearing gold and white vestments at the Mass.
"The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full," he said.
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