Pope begins 21st trip

Press, 2 May 1984, Page 8

Pope begins 21st trip

By

SAMUEL KOO,

of the

uy uniuvuu xxww, vi uiv Associated Press (through NZPA) Vatican City Pope John Paul II has chosen South Korea as the centre-piece of his second pilgrimage to the Pacific to pay a personal tribute to what Vatican officials call the world’s fastest-growing Catholic Church. He will begin the 11-day journey — his twenty-first foreign tour as Pontiff — today with a three-hour stop at Fairbanks, Alaska, for a meeting with President Ronald Reagan, who will be returning from a visit to China. From there the Pope’s special Alitalia jetliner will take the same route to Seoul flown by Korean Air Lines flight 007 in September before it strayed off course into Soviet airspace and was downed by Soviet missiles with the loss of 269 lives. Some Vatican officials said that the gesture reflected the Pope’s wish to demonstrate solidarity with his Korean hosts. Highlights of his trip will include canonising 103 martyrs in Korea — the first canonisation outside the Vatican in modern times — Pacific islandhopping h in Papua New Guinea-.'and the Solomon

Islands, an inter-faith dialogue in largely Buddhist Thailand, and a visit to an Indo-Chinese refugee centre outside Bangkok. The Pope launched an appeal on Friday for unification of Communist North Korea with the South and said that he was making the trip as an apostle of peace for the divided Korean peninsula. The Pope’s appeal, in Korean, was televised in South Korea by the country’s State-run broadcasting system. “To possible criticism (of the visit) by authorities in the North and their

we can respond by saying that he (the Pope) would be quite willing to go also to the North, if he is invited,” said the Rev. Sesto Quercetti, deputy director of the Vatican Radio. Local authorities are taking extraordinary steps to ensure the Pope’s safety because of Intelligence reports that international terrorist groups were plotting an attack against him during the trip. Vatican and diplomatic sources said that the reports had been put together by United States and Italian Intelligence services and given to the Vatican. Among the terrorist groups cited in the reports were Turkey’s neo-Nazi “Gray Wolves” and the notorious Venezuelan terrorist, “Carlos,” whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the sources said. The reports had indicated that the terrorist groups planned to enter South Korea from Japan, possibly helped by "elements” close to North Korea, the sources said. In South Korea, the President, Mr Chun Doo Hwan, has ordered a full antiterrorism alert and assigned elite Presidential Guards to protect the Pope. The beefed-up security also has been seen as an

effort to keep student antiGovernment demonstrations, which have been going on for weeks, from getting out of hand. The Thai Government has assigned the military to handle Papal security. Papua New Guinean authorities have even ordered the tribesmen of the Highlands to leave their bows and arrows at home when they greet the Pope. During his first trip to Asia, in 1981, John Paul visited the Philippines, Guam, Japan, and made refuelling stops at Karachi,

Pakistan, and Anchorage, Alaska. Propaganda Fide, the Vatican’s missionary service, says that the Pope will find in South Korea a dynamic Church, developing at a rate unprecedented in Asia or in other continents, a church which today constitutes a concrete hope for the Church in Asia and for the universal Church. During the last three decades the 200-year-old South Korean Church has grown at nearly 10 per cent a year — to more than 1.6 million out of South Korea’s 40 million population. Japan, with 118 million people, counts only 300,000 Catholics, more than 400 years after the arrival of missionaries. Vatican officials predict that the number of South Korean Catholics will double in about eight years, surpassing Indonesia to become the second-largest Catholic country in east Asia after the Philippines. With the Pope’s endorsement, Korean Church leaders have picked reconciliation as the theme for his one-day visit to Kwangju, the scene of bloody anti-Government riots in 1980 in which nearly 200 people, by the official accountfiwere killed. »f V