Pope John Paul II ended his three-day visit to Austria without directly addressing the deep divisions in the Catholic Church there. But he offered clear support to conservative bishops and repeated his opposition to lay people taking on some of the duties of priests or women being ordained deacons.
Police estimated that 50,000 people attended the Pope's Mass in Vienna's Heldenplatz (Heroes' Square), compared to the 130,000 who turned out to see him in the same place two years ago.
Reform-minded Catholics, some of whom held posters calling for changes in church teaching, said they were "immeasurably disappointed" by the Pope's visit.
The Pope made no mention of the sex scandal surrounding the former Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Hans-Hermann Groer, who is alleged to have sexually abused students in his care. But he praised the Bishop of St Poelten, Dr Kurt Krenn, a staunch supporter of Cardinal Groer and the leading conservative in the Austrian episcopal college.
Dr Krenn felt so confident of the Pope's support that he called on the faithful to pray for the disgraced cardinal during the papal visit to St Poelten.
Hundreds of thousands of Austrian Catholics have left the church in recent years, partly in outrage at the failure of the hierarchy to tell the truth about Cardinal Groer but also in frustration at the lack of reform.
The Pope said that he was praying for the Austrian church, but insisted that the time was not yet right to comment on the disputes at the heart of the crisis.
Scolding the bishops for going public with their conflicts, he said that "like every house that has special rooms that are not open to all guests", the church too needed "rooms for talks that require privacy".
"Another danger is the interference of public opinion while dialogue is going on. A successful dialogue is endangered if it takes place before a public which is not sufficiently qualified or prepared and with a mass media which is not always impartial.
"The precipitate and inadequate involvement of public opinion could sensitively disturb a dialogue process which in itself could look promising," he said.
Standing in the same place in which Adolf Hitler delivered a victory speech following his annexation of Austria in 1938, the Pope beatified three Austrians.
Sister Restituta Kafka was a nun who was arrested and executed in 1943 after she referred to Hitler as "the madman" and refused to remove crucifixes from hospital rooms.
Referring to the events of 1938, the Pope said: "Sixty years ago, from the balcony of this square, a man proclaimed himself the saviour.
"Those newly beatified have a different message. They tell us: Not in a human lies salvation, but in Jesus Christ."
The other two beatifications were of Father Jakob Kern, a priest seriously injured in the first World War who died in 1924, and Father Anton-Maria Schwartz, who founded an order to care for the urban poor at the end of the 19th century.
