Pope Benedict XVI made a pilgrimage back to his roots on the third day of his five-day trip to Bavaria, praying at one of Germany's holiest sites, the statue of the Black Madonna in the town of Altötting, where he had worshipped as a child.

Legend has it that a three-year-old girl was brought back to life after drowning when her mother put her before the wooden Madonna in 1489.

The Pope knelt and prayed before the 70 centimetre-tall statue which dates back to the early 14th century and draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every year.

The 79-year-old pontiff is also scheduled to pay a 15-minute visit to the nearby town where he was born, Marktl am Inn in the far south-east corner of Germany, near the Austrian border.

Many of the thousands of people packing the center of Altötting had been waiting there since the early hours to get a good view of the Pope, whose white "papamobile" wound through the streets to the chapel square.

Both Altötting and Marktl have been working themselves into a frenzy for weeks ahead of the visit, with a wealth of souvenirs  on offer ranging from marzipan mitres to Pope beer. Benedict dolls with grey hair and fully moveable limbs are being sold for €139, although shops are offering a 10% "pope discount."

The Pope, born Joseph Ratzinger, has said he wants to visit his home and the people who shaped his life on his trip to Bavaria, Germany's most Catholic state, where the greeting "Grüss Gott" is still far more common than "Guten Tag."

Every village has its onion-domed church and crosses and statues adorn country paths.

The Pope will also visit his brother Georg, who was cathedral director in the city of Regensburg for thirty years.

Some 250,000 faithful attended an open-air mass Benedict held in Munich on Sunday where he warned that Western society was losing its soul to scientific rationality and becoming "deaf" to God's wishes.

"We simply can't hear him anymore -- there are too many different frequencies filling our ears," he said.

"Social issues and the Gospel are inseparable," said Pope Benedict. "When we bring people only knowledge, ability, technical competence and tools, we bring them too little," he said, emphasizing his central concern that secularization and materialism have replaced faith in Western thinking.

He later led vespers at the Cathedral Of Our Lady in Munich where he served as archbishop from 1977 to 1982.

Amid the blanket media coverage of his visit, Bild am Sonntag dug up a story on how his parents met through an advertisement his father, Joseph Ratzinger senior, placed in the Catholic weekly newspaper Altöttinger Liebfrauenbote ("Altötting Messenger of Our Dear Lady") in 1920.

The ad read: "Lower-level state civil servant, unmarried, cath. 43 yrs, with pension entitlement, seeks good cath. girl who can cook and also sew a little, with trousseau and a little wealth, for marriage as soon as possible," Bild am Sonntag reported.