NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, marking the third anniversary of his election, urged the U.S. Catholic Church on Saturday to overcome its divisions and seek “purification” and the truth following its sexual abuse scandal.

Benedict began the penultimate day of his first U.S. papal visit with a solemn Mass in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Gothic church completed in 1879 with the pennies of immigrants and known as the center of American Catholicism.

The pope rode down New York’s usually bustling Fifth Avenue, a section of which was eerily deserted and sealed off by security agents, in a black limousine and emerged wearing a fur-fringed white cape.

He was welcomed on the steps of the great cathedral by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who earlier in an address inside the church joked about being Jewish.

“Pope Benedict could not have picked a better time to come to New York -- a beautiful spring weekend, the 200th anniversary of the archdiocese of New York, and on top of that it’s Passover,” Bloomberg said.

The Mass reflected New York’s ethnic mix, with prayers in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, German and Akan, a group of languages from West Africa still used there and by the descendants of escaped slaves from South America.

For the fifth consecutive day, the pope spoke out about the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the U.S. Church and has cost it some $2 billion in settlement payments with victims.

In his sermon, he said he was spiritually close to the U.S. Church as it deals with the aftermath of the scandal and cleanses and renews itself.

“I join you in praying that this will be a time of purification for each and every particular Church and religious community, a time for healing. I also encourage you to cooperate with your bishops who continue to work effectively to resolve this issue,” he said.

MOVE FORWARD, SEEK THE TRUTH

The pope, who lamented “division between different groups, different generations, different members of the same religious family,” asked God to grant the U.S. Church “a renewed sense of unity and purpose” so that it could “move forward in hope, in love for the truth and for one another.”

Benedict, 81, while in Washington on the first leg of the U.S. visit on Thursday, met victims of sexual abuse by priests. On his way to the United States, he said that “it is more important to have good priests than to have many priests.”

Welcoming the pope into the cathedral, the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Edward Egan, referred to the sexual abuse crisis: “You know our weaknesses and our strengths ... you know our victories and defeats,” he said.

Slideshow ( 17 images )

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi denied reports that Cardinal William Levada, who succeeded the pope as chief doctrinal official, had said the Church might alter the statute of limitations on abuse cases. He said no changes were planned.

Lombardi said the pope “feels that the atmosphere is very friendly for him, the reception is very good and that people understand his message and feel they are understood by him.”

The pope is trying to rally the spirits of a Church that has seen a drop in priestly vocations and the closing of inner city schools and consolidation of parishes.

Slideshow ( 17 images )

The number of Catholic priests in the United States has fallen from more than 58,000 in 1965 to just under 41,500 last year, according to the Center for Applied Research into the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

While the number of U.S. Catholics rose from 45.6 million in 1965 to 64.4 million in 2007, the number of graduate-level seminarians fell from 8,325 to 3,274.

On Saturday night the pope traveled to the New York suburb of Yonkers, where, remembering his own youth under the yoke of the “monster” of Nazism, he urged young Americans to avoid the snares of drugs and materialism and seek the truth about life.

On Sunday the pope is to visit New York’s Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center towers destroyed on September 11, 2001, and celebrate Mass at Yankee Stadium.

(Additional reporting by Claudia Parsons, Michelle Nichols, and Tom Heneghan; editing by Vicki Allen, Philip Barbara and Eric Walsh)