POLAND: Pope John Paul, addressing his largest crowd ever in Poland, said yesterday only God would decide if he could return home again and warned that the new millennium was threatened by an onslaught of evil.
Preaching to an estimated 2.7 million people in Krakow, the Pope showed that age and a string of health problems had not dimmed his spirit.
Despite the heat and his heavy liturgical vestments, he completed a three-hour ceremony and responded to chants from his adoring compatriots with the wit and timing of an actor.
"I want to thank \ for the hospitality and I would also like to add 'see you again' but I leave this completely in God's hands," he said, improvising at the end of the Mass. The Pope (82) also once again joked about reports that he would retire instead of reigning for life as is customary.
When the crowd chanted "stay with us", he responded: "That's nice, you are trying to persuade me to abandon Rome."
The Pope's message in his sermon, however, was a sombre warning about a future where a lack of respect for life was leading the world to destruction.
"Man lives in fear of the future, of emptiness, of suffering and annihilation," said the Pope, who during his four-day trip has offered a message of divine comfort to a world still shaken by the September 11th attacks on the United States.
A prayer read during the Mass asked God to heal "the sorrow of nations in the darkness of wars and the suffering of people who are threatened with hunger and terrorism".
The leader of the world's one billion Catholics has used his ninth trip home to console the poor and jobless in his native country, which is suffering a harsh economic crisis.
He has received a rapturous welcome from his fellow Poles, who revere him as a father figure who inspired their resistance to communism and steadied them in the difficult years of the transition to democracy after they won freedom in 1989.
"We have been waiting here since Friday. He is the only Pole we can believe and trust," said Isabella Wrobel (21) from Warsaw, sitting amid the sea of people.
"I would do anything for him, sleeping on this field for two nights is nothing." The return to Krakow, the southern city where he studied, was ordained as a priest and grew into the man who would shape 20th century history, has been ripe with nostalgia for the Pope.
But it has also reminded him of life under Nazi German occupation and the later decades of communist repression. Such evils have passed, but others have rushed in, the Pope said.
"With this heritage both of good and evil, we have entered the new millennium. New prospects of development are opening up for mankind, together with hitherto unheard-of dangers."
The Pope laid the blame for the perpetuation of "the mystery of iniquity" on mankind's attempts to usurp God's role as the creator of life, reiterating the church's stern rejection of euthanasia, the cloning of human cells and abortion.
"He \ claims for himself the creator's right to interfere in the mystery of human life. He wishes to determine human life in genetic manipulation and to establish the limit of death," the Pope said.