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April 02, 2005 at 9:10:14 PST
WADOWICE, Poland (AP) -
0402dv-pope-am Poles prayed for Pope John Paul II on Saturday with grief over their beloved native son's approaching death mixed with a wish to see an end to his long and public suffering.
At a noon Mass in St. Mary's basilica in Wadowice, the southern Polish town of 20,000 where the pope was born 84 years ago, the Rev. Krzysztof Glowka told a packed church that "we are here to be with John Paul in his agony, to experience, together with him, this great mystery of life that is death."
"Now as a sick and dying person he is teaching us the most important lesson, the lesson of dying and the lesson of perseverance," he said.
In nearby Krakow, an old friend of the pope, Danuta Michalowska, 82, said her grief had kept her from sleeping for two days. But she had taken solace in a personal letter the pope sent her just last week.
"It was just as if he had written it 20 years ago," said Michalowska, who acted in an underground Krakow theater with young Karol Wojtyla during the Nazi occupation of Poland in the early 1940s. "He joked in the letter and kidded me, as he always did."
Teresa Zyczkowska, whose children were baptized by the pope, gathered with a small group at first light to pay tribute beneath the so-called papal window in the Krakow Curia, where John Paul lived as an archbishop.
Zyczkowska said even after his appointment to the Vatican, the pope retained an informal manner with those he knew in Poland. He told friends "uncle is still uncle, and so we didn't change our way of speaking to him and writing to him," she said.
Now, "we are very sad for him and all the church because we believe it is a very big loss for the church," she said.
St. Mary's in Wadowice stayed open overnight as people flocked from around Poland and outside the country to the pope's hometown to pay their respects.
"If there were a chance for him to get well, I would want him to live until he is 200," said electrician Ryszard Kozak, 45, leaving an early Mass. "But it's just human selfishness to wish for him to continue on like this if it means more suffering."
Many began to think of what will happen after his death, some voicing hope the pontiff's body be returned to his native land for burial.
Most popes in recent centuries have been buried in the St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, his wishes have not been made public and many in Poland are speculating he may be laid to rest alongside Polish kings in Krakow's Wawel Cathedral.
Some voiced hope that even if the pope is laid to rest in Italy, his heart may be interred in the Polish cathedral.
"It is not possible that he'll be buried in Krakow - only in Rome," Kozak said. "But it would be very nice to have at least a part of this great person in his own country. Maybe just his heart."
The pope is deeply loved in mainly Roman Catholic Poland, where his 26-year pontificate has served as a source of great national pride and where gratitude is still strong for his role in helping bring down communism in 1989-90 and freeing Poland from domination by the Soviet Union.
"John Paul II's reign was a golden age for Poland, and I don't want to think about the fact that this time will come to an end," said Wlodzimierz Koc, 63, at Warsaw's St. Anne's Cathedral.
Polish newspapers on Saturday were filled with news of little else.
"The Holy Father is close to God," read the headline in the daily Rzeczpospolita, its pages filled with photographs of people worldwide praying for the pontiff. The daily Gazeta Wyborcza's headline read "John Paul II is leaving."
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Associated Press reporters Katarzyna Mala and Yuras Karmanau in Warsaw contributed to this report.
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April 02, 2005 at 9:21:35 PST
VATICAN CITY (AP) -
The Vatican said Saturday that Chinese authorities have carried out a new series of arrests of officials from that country's non-government controlled Catholic Church.
The most recent arrest occurred Wednesday, when a priest was picked up in Hebei, the same diocese whose bishop was arrested Jan. 3.
The statement said security forces also detained the 86-year-old bishop of Wenzhou, Monsignor James Lin Xili, on March 20 and two days later a lay official of the diocese.
China broke ties with the Vatican in 1951 and demands that Catholics worship only in churches approved by the state-controlled church group, which does not recognize the pope's authority. However, even state churches acknowledge the pope as a spiritual leader.
Many Chinese Catholics, however, remain fiercely loyal to Rome and risk arrest by worshipping in unofficial churches and private homes. The state church claims 4 million believers, but the Cardinal Kung Foundation, a U.S.-based religious monitoring group, has said the unofficial church has 12 million followers.
The pope's deteriorating health was front-page news across much of Asia but not in China, where the state-run media ignored it Saturday.
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