He was greeted by a brass band and loud cheers from the crowd as he stepped from his limousine in Marktl-am-Inn, the latest stop on the nostalgic six-day tour of his native region of southern Germany.
Well wishers in the town situated 100 kilometres from Munich craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the former Joseph Ratzinger, whose father Joseph senior was the local policeman.
The pope spent a few minutes praying in the Church of St Oswald, where he was christened on the day he was born, April 16, 1927.
He knelt briefly at the baptismal font, accompanied by his 82-year-old brother Georg, a retired priest, before climbing into the pope-mobile to be driven through the town.
Although he got out of the car in front of the two-storey house where he was born and spent the first two years of his life, he did not approach the building.
Instead, he paused to admire an engraved bronze column featuring scenes of his life which was erected opposite the house this month in time for his visit.
The house has been extensively renovated for the event, but the pope has said he has no memories of living there. His father's job took the family to the nearby town of Tittmoning when he was two years old.
The yellow and white-painted exterior of the house had to be hastily touched up after vandals spattered it with blue paint on Sunday.
Pope Benedict was returning to his birthplace for the first time since he was elected pope in April last year.
The entire visit lasted barely 30 minutes, but Richard Straubinger, 40, a farmer from Marktl, said the town was grateful.
"There are so many places in the world that a pope needs to visit that it's touching that he found the time to come here. We got the chance to show how proud we are of him."
The Marktl visit was the culmination of a day when the pope left behind the cosmopolitan surroundings of Munich to return to the rural Bavaria where he grew up.
Earlier he addressed seminarians in the pilgrimage centre of Altoetting and appealed for new vocations to the priesthood.
"God's harvest is indeed great, and it needs labourers," Benedict said in the town's St Anne's Basilica, where he had prayed as a child.
The Roman Catholic Church needed priests to spread the Gospel not only in Latin America, Africa and Asia, but also in Germany and "in the vast lands of Russia", Benedict said.
The comment is likely to do little to thaw relations between Rome and the Russian Orthodox Church, which has accused the Vatican of proselytism in traditional Orthodox regions, and blocked moves by Benedict's predecessor Pope John Paul II to visit Moscow.
"In the so-called Third World -- in Latin America, in Africa and in Asia -- people are waiting for heralds to bring them the Gospel of peace, the good news of God who became man.
"But also in the so-called West, here among us in Germany, and in the vast lands of Russia, it is true that a great harvest could be reaped," the pope said.
In European countries like Germany, the number of churchgoers has dwindled in recent years and papal authority has been questioned.
While his visit is partly a trip down memory lane, Benedict is keen to try to halt the decline of religious observance in his native Germany.
Recent figures indicate some 100,000 people turn their back on the Church in Germany annually.
The pontiff is making his fourth foreign trip in the 17 months since becoming pope and the second to Germany. He has also visited Poland and Spain.