Speaking during his first interview since becoming Pope in April, he rejected the idea that Christianity was a religion of commandments and prohibitions and that non-Christians were “free of its burdens”.

He told Vatican Radio yesterday that it was “beautiful to be a Christian . . . being supported by love is not a burden. Be proud to be Catholic.” La Repubblica said that the phrase was “the hallmark of Pope Benedict” and the equivalent of “Do not be afraid”, John Paul II’s first “papal soundbite”.

In the interview, which was given in German, the Pope, 78, said that he hoped this week’s World Youth Day in Cologne would give “a fresh impulse to the Old Continent”.

The Cologne gathering, which despite its name lasts nearly a week, begins tomorrow, with the Pope arriving on Thursday.

It is his first foreign trip and all eyes will be on the small, delicate figure in white to see how he measures up to the formidable reputation of his predecessor.

John Paul II inaugurated the idea of such youth gatherings, forging them into a highly charged mixture of rock concerts, religious symbolism and mass prayer.

Pope Benedict, who was formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy, has a reputation as an austere, shy hardliner with little of his predecessor’s showmanship. He is also 20 years older than the athletic Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was when he was made Pope.

On the other hand he displayed an acute sense of drama during the late Pope’s funeral, which helped to get him elected. He has since shown an unexpected human touch and adopted a public style of his own, characteristically raising his hands in the air to greet the faithful with a warm smile of obvious delight.

During his holiday in the Italian Alps this summer, his dress sense — jaunty baseball cap and Cartier sunglasses — was eye-catching. Father Luigi Garbini, a Catholic author, told Vanity Fair that while John Paul II was alive he and Cardinal Ratzinger had been “Jekyll and Hyde”, with the late pontiff as the showman and the cardinal as the Grand Inquisitor in the shadows. “Now he has to play both roles,” Father Garbini said.

Vatican officials expect more than a million young pilgrims to attend the Cologne event, exceeding the 800,000 who demonstrated their adoration for John Paul II at the last World Youth Day in Canada three years ago. Cardinal Karl Lehmann, the Archbishop of Mainz, said: “Every Pope has his own personality and one should not expect a copy of Pope John Paul.”

The Pope has spoken of his mission to revive Christianity in Europe, which he believes stands on “the edge of the abyss” because of godlessness.

Since being elected he has intervened to help to defeat a referendum in Italy that would have liberalised assisted fertility and has opposed new laws in Spain allowing gay marriage. On his Alpine holiday he told local priests that the West had lost its way because it was tired of its own culture. Traditional churches, both Catholic and Protestant, were dying, he said.

He will also reach out to the other monotheistic faiths. On Friday he will become the second Pope in history to enter a Jewish place of worship when he visits the Cologne synagogue, which was destroyed by the Nazis during the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938 but rebuilt after the Second World War.

Critics point out that whereas John Paul had many Jewish friends dating from his time as an anti-Nazi priest in German-occupied Poland, Benedict has had to overcome lingering doubts caused by his compulsory membership of the Hitler Youth as a teenager.

But he insists that he and the late Pope both experienced the “barbarity” of Nazism first hand, albeit “on different sides and in different situations”. One of his first acts as pontiff was to assure Jewish leaders that dialogue was among his priorities. He is also embroiled in a diplomatic dispute over his failure to mention Israel in a list of places hit by terrorism this summer.

The Pope will also address Muslim leaders in Germany. He argues that Muslims and Jews feel threatened not by the West’s Christianity, but rather by its “godless” secularism and materialism.

Last week the Pope announced that he would grant “plenary indulgences” for the remission of sins to those attending the Cologne gathering, a move seen by some liberal Catholics as a throwback to medieval practices.

The sale of indulgences sparked the Protestant revolt in Germany led by Martin Luther which led to the Reformation. However, Vatican officials said that the sale of indulgences had been outlawed in the 16th century by the Council of Trent, and that Pope John Paul II had granted indulgences to pilgrims who travelled to Rome for the 2000 Jubilee year.

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