Benedict smiled and waved after the performance by the four award-winning Pellegrini brothers, who stripped to the waist and jumped into gravity-defying poses wearing tight white trousers.
There were around 7,000 people in the audience.
The pope later met with Walter Mixa, a controversial former German bishop who resigned after admitting he beat children and youths in a Catholic orphanage between 1975 and 1996. The two shook hands and exchanged a few words.
Like other European countries and the United States, Germany has been rocked in recent months by revelations that hundreds of children were physically or sexually abused in institutions, the vast majority of them Catholic-run.
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