Surrounded by hundreds of thousands of families from every corner of the globe, Pope Benedict XVI urged mothers and fathers to be open to life and to create a home based on love, acceptance and mercy.

Though this seaport city was still reeling from a July 3 subway disaster that left 42 people dead and dozens more injured, the atmosphere during the pope's July 8-9 visit was full of joy and celebration.

The pope journeyed to Spain's third-largest city to help close the July 1-9 Fifth World Meeting of Families and to focus on its theme, The Transmission of Faith in the Family.

In his July 9 closing Mass homily, Pope Benedict emphasised that families have a duty to make sure “the good news of Christ will reach their children with the utmost clarity and authenticity.”

Handing down Church teaching and Gospel values also entails consistently living out those same values of love and charity, the pope said to hundreds of thousands of people gathered at Valencia's ultramodern, outdoor City of the Arts and Sciences centre.

Children will be more likely to appreciate and cherish their Christian heritage if they witness their parents' constant “love, permeated with a living faith,” along with experiencing the support of a Christian community, he said.

In his homily, the pope urged husbands and wives to be open to the gift of life, saying each human is not created by accident or random selection, but is part of “a loving plan of God.”

“Married couples must accept the child born to them, not simply as theirs alone, but also as a child of God, loved for his or her own sake and called to be a son or daughter of God,” he said.

Then these children must be bathed in love, the pope added, stressing that “the experience of being welcomed and loved by God and by our parents is always the firm foundation for authentic human growth” and development.

The pope also emphasised this during a festive July 8 vigil when he told parents that every child has his or her own “personality and character” and, no matter what, parents need to accept their children, including adopted children.

He urged people to “be sensitive, loving and merciful like Christ” even to people outside the family.

Families should not be “closed in on themselves”, the pope said at the vigil, so children can learn that “every person is worthy of love, and that there is a basic, universal brotherhood that embraces every human being.”

In an address to the city's seminarians July 8, Pope Benedict said a loving, harmonious home life is also good for vocations since the love, devotion and fidelity of one's parents create a fertile setting for men and women “to hear God's call and to accept the gift of a vocation.”

The pope reemphasised the Church's teaching against divorce and insisted marriage is based only on a union between a man and a woman. Spain recently passed laws that made divorce quicker and easier and allowed homosexual couples to marry and adopt children.

The Church in Spain has been at loggerheads with the government led by Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero for what the Church sees as promoting policies that attack the family and life.

The pope met with Zapatero in a private audience July 8 in the archbishop's residence, and reporters said crowds outside jeered the prime minister upon his arrival.

The Spanish daily ABC reported July 9 that a government spokesman for Zapatero said the half-hour audience was “extremely cordial” and that he and the pope talked about “peace, the family, immigration, the future of Europe and, especially, the situation in Africa.”

During his two-day visit, Pope Benedict seemed more interested in accenting what was working and making families thrive than in finger-pointing.

During the papal flight to Valencia, reporters asked the pope about gay marriage laws and other measures that challenge Church teaching. The pope said he preferred to “not start on the negative.”

He said stressing what is positive about Christian living can help people see “why the Church cannot accept certain things, but at the same time wants to respect people and help them.”

In some of his speeches, all delivered in Spanish, the pope said laws need to protect families and life not because of Church teaching, but to promote and protect “the integral good of the human being”.

In a written message delivered July 8 to the country's bishops, the pope encouraged them to “continue dauntlessly” in their efforts to remind people that acting as if God did not exist or that pushing faith out of the public sphere “undermines the truth about humankind and compromises the future of culture and society.”

Organisers said at least 800,000 people attended the weeklong meeting and that close to 1.5 million people saw the pope in the city over the weekend.

The city was festooned in the colours of the Vatican and this year's meeting, with yellow and white flags, banners and flowers.

Thousands of people lined the six-mile route from the airport to the city centre to see the pope riding in his white pope-mobile, to cheer and wave banners, and to toss colourful confetti on the papal convoy from highway overpasses.

Streets were packed with babies pushed in carriages, toddlers riding on adults' shoulders, teens sporting homemade T-shirts, parents and grandparents, all trying to beat the 90-degree heat with parasols, umbrellas, hats and thousands of fluttering, hand-held fans.

The pope made the site of the subway disaster his first stop after his arrival. He laid a wreath of white flowers and bowed in prayer at the entrance of the Jesus subway station with the city's archbishop, mayor, some members of the royal family, and scores of emergency workers.

Later that day in the city's Basilica of the Virgin, the pope met with family members of those who died when two subway cars overturned after smashing against the tunnel walls.

He greeted the grief-stricken families individually after they prayed together before a statue of Our Lady of the Needy, the city's patroness. (CNS)