Pope sets out on centenary trip

Pope John Paul sets out on Thursday on number 100, a five day tour of Croatia, a Roman Catholic stronghold in the Balkans.

With the Croatia trip, the 83-year-old pope will have been on the road for an amazing 575 days – nearly 1 and a half years of his pontificate, according to Vatican Radio, which keeps statistics on papal travel.

From the start of his papacy, he made clear that in this global age, travel was required. Almost immediately upon his election in October 1978, he accepted an invitation to the Dominican Republic and Mexico for a trip his predecessor, John Paul I, had turned down.

That was trip No. 1 in January, 1979, the start of travel to 129 countries.

Upon arriving, he would kneel and kiss the ground, a practice he has given up because Parkinson’s disease and hip and knee ailments have made him too weak to bend down. In recent trips, he has blessed a pot of soil held up to him.

Aboard the chartered Alitalia jetliner he began the tradition of airborne news conferences.

Walking down the aisles in the press section in the rear of the plane, John Paul answered questions posed in half a dozen languages, raising eyebrows among Vatican officials who thought the exercise undignified.

Flying to South America, he defined Chile under Augusto Pinochet as “dictatorial” and said it was the pope’s ”task” to speak out against human rights abuses.

On another trip, asked what the thought of the controversial Second World War pope Pius XII he responded without a pause, “A great pope.”

And pressed why he received Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who was accused of complicity in war crimes, he snapped, “He was elected democratically in a democratic country.”

Returning from a gruelling two-week trip to Bangladesh, Singapore, the Fiji Islands, New Zealand and Australia in 1986 a weary John Paul, sipping white wine and picking at his lobster salad, persistently asked reporters questions about his pilgrimage and expressed fascination that Australians seemed more American than British.

No pilgrimage has drawn the raw emotions or had the political impact as the first of his nine trips to his native Poland.

It was the height of the Cold War: Soviet-made armoured vehicles in a show of disrespect trampled over flowers strewn on the motorcade route and John Paul winced every time police pushed back Poles seeking to greet him.

His presence rallied Poles, giving them the courage to form the Solidarity trade union that sowed the seeds for the collapse of communism across eastern Europe a decade later.

As he left the country last August, teary-eyed Poles at his last public appearance pleaded “stay with us.”

The 100th trip has come in a year of milestones for John Paul. He recently became the fourth longest-serving pope in history and will mark his 25th year as pontiff in October.

But he intends to keep going, even it means using lifts to get on and off planes, elevators to reach the altar and hydraulic chairs to celebrate Mass while seated.

Ahead of him this year is a day trip June 22 to Bosnia and there are plans for a late August pilgrimage to Mongolia, a mainly Buddhist country with a Catholic population of only 170.

“Going that far for so few would really symbolise this papacy,” said his spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls.