Pope John Paul ended his visit to Ukraine yesterday by beatifying Soviet-era martyrs at an open-air Mass attended by one million worshippers.
The huge crowd - by far the largest turnout during his five-day visit - packed a racecourse in Lviv, the spiritual centre of Ukrainian Catholicism, to hear the Pope urge reconciliation with the Orthodox Church.
The beatification ceremony was the symbolic climax to the papal pilgrimage to the former Soviet republic, where the Catholic faith was outlawed for half a century by the Communist authorities.
"The masses of people present here today bear witness directly that our church has survived the persecution," said Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, the leader of Ukraine's Catholics.
The Pope paid tribute to 28 Catholic bishops, priests, monks, nuns and lay people who had sacrificed their lives rather than renounce their faith to "the infamous Nazi and Communist ideologies".
Renewing his attempt to end the 1,000-year schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches - a constant theme of the visit to Ukraine - the Pope urged the crowd to see the martyrs' sacrifice as "a pressing call for reconciliation and unity".
"During the last centuries, too many stereotyped ways of thinking, too much mutual resentment and too much intolerance have accumulated. The only way to clear the path is to forget the past, ask forgiveness of one another and forgive one another," he said.
On arriving in Kiev, the Pope begged for Orthodox forgiveness for Catholic "errors", but Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexis II responded by saying that a single papal apology was not enough to heal centuries of division.
However, signs of a thaw in relations between Rome and Moscow came yesterday when a leading figure in the Russian church joined the Pope in celebrating the Eastern rite mass favoured by Ukraine's Catholics.
Father Ivan Sviridov of the Moscow patriarchate had come to Lviv "because the Pope's message of peace, dialogue and unity represents a historic moment, and he did not want to just let it pass", the Vatican spokesman, Dr Joaquin Navarro Valls, said.
But a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox church in Moscow denied that Father Sviridov was in Lviv in an official capacity.
Twenty-five of the Ukrainian martyrs the Pope beatified - a penultimate step before conferring sainthood in the Catholic church - were victims of Communist oppression.
Among them was Roman Lysko, a Lviv Catholic who died in a Soviet prison in 1949, but whose 79-year-old widow Neonila and two children attended yesterday's ceremony.