Heavy rain, lower turnout for Pope mass in Warsaw

WARSAW, May 26 (Reuters) Heavy rain poured down on Warsaw today as Pope Benedict celebrated his first outdoor mass before hundreds of thousands of Poles who turned out for his pilgrimage in the steps of his Polish predecessor John Paul.

Although organisers had expected a million faithful to gather on the same square where John Paul held his first papal mass here in 1979, initial police estimates spoke of almost 300,000 coming to pray with the German-born Pope. The crowd seemed lost under a sea of umbrellas and flags, mostly from Poland but some from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Dozens of bishops and priests in red vestments filed up to the altar, each carrying his own white umbrella.

''The heavy rain doesn't scare us away,'' said a pensioner who gave her name only as Eugenia. She said she used to attend John Paul's huge masses during his visits to Poland.

Newspapers ran mixed reviews of Benedict's first day in Poland yesterday, noting he drew smaller crowds than John Paul and faulting him for driving by memorials such as one to victims of the 1943 Jewish Ghetto uprising without stopping.

Church spokesmen were quick to criticise media reports of a lower turnout, showing that negative comparisons with John Paul's triumphal visits were a sensitive issue.

''I think the media tend to exaggerate,'' Father Adam Schulz, head of the Catholic Movements Council, told TVN 24 television.

A huge cross towered over the altar on Pilsudski Square in central Warsaw where John Paul electrified his compatriots in 1979 by encouraging them to defy their communist rulers.

The Solidarity trade union was born a year after that mass and Poland shook off communist rule a decade later, two events many Poles attribute to John Paul's clear opposition role.

PILGRIMAGE TURNS SOUTH After the mass, Benedict will fly by helicopter to Czestochowa in southern Poland to visit the Jasna Gora shrine with its revered Black Madonna icon.

He will end the day in Krakow, where John Paul served as a priest, bishop and cardinal until he was elected pope in 1978.

There he will be the guest of Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was John Paul's personal secretary for 26 years and now ranks as Poland's most powerful cleric even though he is neither its primate nor the head of its bishops' conference.

Benedict, 79, undertook his four-day tour to honour John Paul and build a rapport with Poland, a deeply Catholic country that both he and his predecessor have said could help revive Christian beliefs and values in an increasingly secular Europe.

His visit could also help break down lingering distrust in Poland towards him and Germany, which occupied the country during World War Two and killed vast numbers of Poles and Jews.

In deference to Polish and Jewish sensitivities, Benedict will avoid speaking German except for when he prays on Sunday at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, where 1.5 million people, many of them Jews, were killed during World War Two.

REUTERS SRS VV1414