Pope embarks on pilgrimage in footsteps of St Paul the Apostle

By Simon Caldwell
THE POPE today embarked on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Paul — which will take in Greece, Syria and Malta.
John Paul II, who is 81 on May 18, this evening visited the site of the Areopagus, the court on a hillside near to the Acropolis which was devoted to Mars, the god of war, and where St Paul preached to the people of Athens about the "unknown God" — in whom, he said, "we live. move and have our being".
Tomorrow, the Pope will celebrate Mass in an I 8,000seat basketball court for the Catholics of Greece, who number just 100,000, before he leaves for Damascus, the city where St Paul was baptised into the Church after being suddenly blinded by a "light from heaven" while hunting Christians as Saul of Tarsus.
In Damascus, the Holy Father will become the first pope to ever visit a mosque when he will make a joint invocation with Muslim clerics at the Omayyad Mosque on Sunday.
The mosque has a chapel dedicated to St John the Baptist and is believed to be built on the site of the last resting place of his head.
On Monday, the Pope will visit the Church of St Paul in the Bab Kissan Gate of the old walls of the city before he will leave by car for El Quneitra in the Golan Heights, where he will pray for peace.
On Tuesday. the Pontiff will
fly to Malta, where St Paul was shipwrecked, and will preside over a beatification ceremony. He will also visit the tomb of Blessed George Preca.
Although the visit to Greece had the unanimous approval of the 79 bishops of the Greek Orthodox Church, it is still being opposed by a rump of Orthodox monks and clerics, some of whom have attacked the Pope as an "arch-heretic" and a "two-horned grotesque monster of Rome".
Some of them have accused the Catholic Church of sacking Constantinople during the Crusades, and have also blamed it for the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks; the Spanish Inquisition; the Bolshevik Revolution; the Third Reich and the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Serb forces in Kosovo.
The Vatican and the Greek bishops both agreed that the Pope's visit has the exclusive character of a pilgrimage.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, added that the Greek bishops had not invited the Pope but merely withdrew their objections to his visit.
Cardinal Kasper said: "They need to encounter this person of the Pope, who is coming not in triumph but as an older man, physically weak, and as a pilgrim who wants to follow the footsteps of the Apostle Paul.
"I think the charismatic personality of the Pope can overcome walls, and this is very important in our relationship with the Orthodox."
He added: "We are aware of all the faults that we have committed through history, especially during the Crusades. The sack of Constantinople was a terrible thing, which involved the politics of the time and not just the Church.
"Yes, we have to confess our faults and ask forgiveness. But we also have to move forward in a common future. We should not be chained to the past, because there is a new situation now and we have to give witness together."
Over the next six months, the Pope also intends to visit Catholic minorities in Ukraine and Armenia.
It is expected that the Armenian Patriarch, Karekin II, will welcome the Pope to his country in September, but the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, which is linked to the Russian Orthodox Church, is bitterly divided over his visit, and protests may be staged in Kiev and Lviv when he arrives there in June.
In the meantime, John Paul is likely to be very busy with affairs at home such as the "extraordinary consistory" of cardinals, which will take place in Rome between May 21 and May 24.
The meeting, reflecting upon the Pope's New Year apostolic letter, Novo Millen9 Fijo lneunie (At the Beginning of the New Millennium), will bring together 183 cardinals to scrutinise seven key questions which John Paul believes the Church needs to face.
The Rome daily paper, II Messaggero, said the Pope wanted the cardinals to undertake a process of self-examination which amounted to a "check-up for the Catholic Church at the start of the new millennium".
The questions include how best to convey the message of Christ in a world of religious pluralism; whether the Church is projecting holiness "in all its evangelical radicality"; how to defend the Church and the "originality of its sacraments" in the face of New Age spirituality, and how to tackle world poverty and the negative effects of globalisation.
They will also focus on whether there is a discrepancy between the views of ordinary Catholics on sexual and family matters and prevailing Catholic doctrine; how the world's mass media could best be used to convey Christian values, and how such Church bodies as the Curia and the Synod of Bishops could be "made to function better".