Wednesday May 2 7:36 AM ET
Fragile Pope to Set Out on Delicate Mission

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul leaves in fragile health on Friday for a delicate mission of religious and political peace that will take him from Orthodox Greece to Muslim Syria and Roman Catholic Malta.

The May 4-9 trip will again test the faded stamina of the man once called ``God's Athlete'' because his trips left aides and reporters breathless. The Pope turns 81 this month.

It will be his first overseas trip of the year and his stop in Syria takes him to the Middle East for the first time since the region's peace process began unraveling.

Speaking at his general audience on Wednesday, the Pope asked Catholics to pray for the success of the trip, which he said was ``very significant'' to him.

He said he hoped the stop in Greece would help relations with Orthodox Christians and that his visit to Syria would help those with the Muslim world.

The official purpose of the visit, his 93rd outside Italy, is to retrace the steps of St. Paul, the apostle who converted to Christianity on the road to Damascus and later preached in Athens and Malta on his way to Rome, where he was beheaded.

The trip begins on Friday in Greece, a predominantly Orthodox Christian country where the Pope and Roman Catholic Church are regarded with indifference, if not outright hostility.

During his 24-hour stop in Greece, which Vatican sources said was kept intentionally short for security and political reasons, the Pope will enter a religious minefield.

After much hand-wringing, the Orthodox Church in Greece agreed to go along with a government invitation for the visit, the first by a pontiff since the Great Schism of 1054 divided Christianity into Eastern and Western branches.

In the run-up to the visit, for which Athens will lay on unprecedented security, Orthodox militants have called the Pope everything from ``a two-horned heretic'' to ``a devil in disguise.''

Greece's Catholic community -- 200,000 people in a country of 11 million -- would fit tightly into St. Peter's Square and plans to give him a different welcome at an indoor mass.

Relations between Orthodox Christians and Catholics -- difficult in the best of times -- have become severely strained since the fall of Communism in 1989.

Orthodox communities in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have accused Catholics, suppressed under Communism, of using new-found freedoms to poach believers.

An Appeal For Middle East Peace

In Syria, the second country on the tour, the Pope will issue a peace appeal for the region, perhaps made more pressing by a trembling voice that underscores his frailty.

He will call for peace from the Golan Heights city of Quneitra, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War and returned under a U.S.-negotiated agreement in 1974.

Israeli troops destroyed Quneitra, but still occupy the western Golan. The Jewish state's military radar posts perched on the dominating peak serve as towering reminders, if any were needed, that regional peace has been elusive.

Syria has left Quneitra as it was in 1974 and made the city a museum to illustrate what it calls Zionist destruction.

``The stop in Quneitra will be highly significant,'' said Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls.

By visiting Syria, he will have traveled to Israel and all the border nations that have been at war with the Jewish state.

Another highlight of the Pope's visit to Damascus will be a stop in the splendid Umayyad Mosque, whose history neatly sums up the complexity of Syrian religious history.

The site began as a pagan temple, was converted to a church after Christianity became the Roman Empire's religion in the 4th century and was made a mosque after the Arabs conquered Damascus in 639.

After four days in Syria, the Pope ends his trip in predominantly Catholic Malta, presiding at a beatification ceremony for three Maltese.

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