“During a festive ceremony in St Peter’s Square featuring clowns, people on silts, singers and dancers, the Pope led Eucharistic adoration as well as an informal catechesis based on the questions posed to him by several children. One by one, seven children came up to the Pope and asked him questions on the microphone about why it is important to go to Mass and to confession and what their teachers mean by the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.

One boy asked, “But how can that be? I can’t even see him.”

With a polite laugh, the Pope smiled and explained that there were lots of important things that exist even though they cannot be seen. Intelligence and reason, for example, as well as electricity are all things that are invisible, but one knows they are there because one can see their effect, the Pope said. “We don’t see electrical current, but we see the light” it produces, he said. Just as people cannot see Jesus with their eyes, they can see him through what he effects.

The Pope was visibly delighted at the children’s questions, which in some cases drew a hearty laugh from the pontiff and his audience for their poignancy and sincerity. “Do I have to go to confession every time I go to Communion,” one girl asked the Pope, “even where I commit the same sins because I’ve started to realised they’re always the same ones?” Pope Benedict assured her that it was good to make a habit of going to confession as a way of “soul cleaning” but it was not necessary to go to confession every time, given that her sins were probably not grave. However, just as people clean a house or children tidy up their room “at least once a week, even if the mess is always the same”, the faithful should make a habit of going regularly to confession, he added. “My soul becomes neglected to the point at which I am always pleased with myself and I no longer understand that I also have to work at becoming a better person, the Pope said. “the soul cleaning. . . helps us have a conscience that’s more alert, more open.”

One girl told the Pope that she was happy to go to Mass every Sunday, but she asked how she could convince her parents to go, since they used Sunday as a day to “sleep in” or visit grandparents out of town. Pope Benedict cautioned the child to be very loving and understanding of her parents, ‘who certainly have a lot to do’. ”