Pope prayed not to be chosen

VATICAN CITY -- He kissed babies, blessed people in wheelchairs and joked that he felt like a guillotine was falling on him when he realized that he might be elected pope.\nHe showed he had a sense of humor and knew how to work a crowd -- traits the public rarely saw during his quarter-century as the stern German guardian of the church's conservative doctrine.\nPope Benedict XVI's playfulness Monday was apparent during an audience with German pilgrims who had flocked to his installation Mass a day earlier. At first, he apologized for being late, saying a meeting with religious leaders had run over time.\n"The Germans are used to punctuality," he joked. "I'm already very Italian."\nAnd then he shed some light for the first time on what he said was going on in his mind in the hours before he was elected leader of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics.\n"As the trend in the ballots slowly made me realize that -- in a manner of speaking the guillotine would fall on me -- I started to feel quite dizzy," Benedict told his countrymen in his native German, smiling and chuckling. "I thought that I had done my life's work and could now hope to live out my days in peace.\n"I told the Lord with deep conviction, 'Don't do this to me. You have younger and better (candidates) who could take up this great task with a totally different energy and with different strength.'"\n"Evidently, this time he didn't listen to me," Benedict joked.\nHe said that during the secret deliberations, a fellow cardinal had written him a note, reminding him of the sermon he delivered during the funeral Mass for Pope John Paul II, in which he referred to a biblical passage where God tells the apostle Peter to follow him.\n"My fellow brother wrote me: 'If the Lord should now tell you, 'Follow me,' then remember what you preached. Do not refuse. Be obedient. ...This touched my heart. The ways of the Lord are not comfortable, but we were not created for comfort, but for greatness, for good."\n"So in the end, all I could do say was yes. I am trusting in God, and I am trusting in you, dear friends."\nThe pope met Monday with the religious leaders who had attended his installation, and told Muslim representatives in particular that he wanted to continue building "bridges of friendship" that he said could foster peace in the world.\nBenedict noted that the world is currently marked by conflicts but said it longs for peace.\n"Yet peace is also a duty to which all peoples must be committed, especially those who profess to belong to religious traditions," he said. "Our efforts to come together and foster dialogue are a valuable contribution to building peace on solid foundations"