A man in Erfurt, Germany, fired an airgun today at security forces in Cathedral Square, where 30,000 had gathered for a mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI, Deutsche Welle reveals. The man fired four shots from his open window 600 yards (1 km) from the square a full hour before the pope's arrival. No one was injured, and the mass proceeded without incident two hours later. The man, whose name, age, and motive has not been revealed, is currently in custody. The report stresses that the pope himself was never in any danger as he was not on the scene at the time.
In other news within the Deutsche Welle report, Günther Beckstein, vice president of the Synod of the Protestant Church in Germany, has expressed his disappointment with the pope's speech before Protestant leaders on Friday, faulting him for not explicitly honoring Martin Luther while speaking at the Augustine Monastery in Erfurt where the founder of the Reformation lived and worked. "I will say very openly that I expected more from the pope's speech," said Mr. Beckstein, a former Minister-President of Bavaria and a prominent member of Bavaria's Christian Social Union party.
Update: An AFP report quotes Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See Press Office, as saying that "According to the German police, [the shooting] seems to be the action of an unbalanced person" and "had nothing to do with the pope."
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