Benedict starts Poland tour in Paul's shadow

Warsaw, May 25: Pope Benedict travels to Poland today to urge Catholics to keep the memory of his late predecessor John Paul alive and defend their Christian heritage as they integrate into an increasingly secularised Europe.

The four-day visit, which the German-born Pontiff promised to Polish Catholics soon after his election in April 2005, will bring him to cities and shrines that were central to John Paul's life in Poland and visits back home as pope.

One of the challenges facing him is to establish a rapport with Poland's Catholics, who kept their faith through decades of communism -- which John Paul helped defeat -- but feel somewhat orphaned now that their father figure pope is no longer alive.

The trip will end at the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz, a visit made more delicate by Benedict's German background. Poles say his nationality makes no difference, but he will not speak German publicly for most of the trip to avoid any offence.

''Many people have wondered how Poland will react to a Pope who is not Polish,'' Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz told the PAP news agency. ''The Pope will arrive in a country that loves him and is faithful to him.'' Following in the footsteps of the charismatic John Paul, who in his 26 years at the Vatican turned the papacy into a global mission spreading the Gospel, has been a challenge for the bookish theologian Benedict, 79.

His public masses in Warsaw and Krakow and visits to popular shrines will inevitably be compared to similar appearances by John Paul, whose visits openly challenged the pre-1989 communist governments and inspired millions of his compatriots.

SPRINGTIME OF FAITH Yesterday, Benedict said he hoped his trip would help bring Poland ''a renewed springtime of faith of civil progress and always vividly conserve the memory of my great predecessor''.

The visit will start in the capital Warsaw, where he will meet Poland's leaders on Thursday and celebrate mass on Friday morning in the same central square where John Paul urged Poles in 1979 to ''renew the face ... of this country''.

The focus will shift later tomorrow to the south with visits to Jasna Gora, Poland's holiest shrine, and Krakow, where John Paul served as a priest, bishop and cardinal before his election to the papacy in October 1978.

Benedict will visit Wadowice, John Paul's hometown, and two local shrines on Saturday and celebrate a huge open mass before up to 2 million people in Krakow on Sunday.

The final stop will be Auschwitz, where 1.5 million people -- most of them Jews -- were murdered as part of Adolf Hitler's plan to wipe out European Jewry and work to death other people the Nazis considered unworthy to live.

There, Benedict will underscore his commitment to carrying on John Paul's work of improving relations with Jews and fighting anti-Semitism.

The brief stop at the notorious death camp near Krakow will have deep personal significance for the Pope, who served briefly in the Hitler Youth during the war when membership in the Nazi paramilitary organisation was compulsory.

According to Polish pollster CBOS, 82 percent of Poles believe that the visit will be an important event in their lives, roughly similar to surveys taken before some of Pope John Paul's trips to his homeland.

Reuters