Pope to leave tomorrow for five-day trip
VATICAN CITY (AP) – Despite his frail health and advancing years, Pope John Paul II departs Wednesday for Azerbaijan and Bulgaria, a five-day trip intended to improve relations with Muslims and Orthodox Christians. John Paul, who turned 82 on Saturday, has looked increasingly weak in recent weeks, slowed by the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and knee and hip ailments. But he has made clear he has no intention of stepping down or giving up foreign travel, one of the hallmarks of his 24-year papacy.
“His physical limitations don’t weaken his dedication and the force of his ministry,” Italian Cardinal Camillo Ruini, one of the pope’s closest aides, said Monday.
Last week, two cardinals said they thought the pope would resign if his health deteriorated to the point that he could no longer govern the church.
The pope will spend two days in Azerbaijan, a mostly Muslim country of 7.5 million people on the Caspian Sea with 120 only Catholics by Vatican count, the smallest Catholic flock of any country on his foreign tours. With no church facility fit for a pope available, John Paul will be staying for the first time in a hotel.
While John Paul has visited a number of Muslim countries, he has recently intensified efforts for religious harmony and a repudiation of all forms of violence in the name of religion.
In Kazakhstan last September, he said the Catholic Church respects “authentic Islam,” making the distinction between it and the fanaticism that some fear will stigmatize the religion following the U.S. attacks.
John Paul was invited to the former Soviet republic by President Geidar Aliyev, whose government has been seeking Vatican assistance in highlighting its concerns in the conflict with neighboring Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave in the Muslim nation.
About 30,000 people were killed in the six-year war and a million fled their homes.
The stop in Bulgaria is the latest effort by John Paul to strengthen relations with Orthodox Christians, a visit initially opposed by the Orthodox leadership.
Bulgaria’s leaders hope that the pope’s visit will help dispel lingering suspicions that Bulgarian secret service officers were involved in the 1981 assassination attempt against the pope by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca.
Three Bulgarians suspected of complicity in the shooting were acquitted by an Italian court because of lack of evidence.
Relations between Catholics and Orthodox Christians have often been tense in eastern Europe, where the Vatican has been seen as seeking to expand its influence in traditional Orthodox lands.
The dispute is particularly acute in Russia, which has blocked John Paul’s hopes of visiting the country.
The trip is the first of a series that will test John Paul’s stamina. He is scheduled to visit Canada, Mexico and Guatemala in July and his native Poland in August. There is also talk of a trip to Croatia in September.
John Paul asked Catholics at a canonization ceremony Sunday to join him in prayer to help him go on with his mission.