Pope John Paul to beatify Croatian nun

Pope John Paul beatified a Croatian nun today who devoted her life to helping poor children.

The 83-year-old pontiff's 100th foreign pilgrimage took him to Dubrovnik, an ancient coastal resort devastated by Serb shelling during Croatia’s 1991 war for independence.

At a papal Mass in the city’s scenic port, which still bears the scars of the heavy artillery barrages, John Paul was to beatify Marija Petkovic, a nun who died in Rome in 1966 after founding a religious community that cared for impoverished children in Croatia and South America.

Last year, the Vatican authenticated a miracle attributed to Petkovic: the saving of a Peruvian navy submarine struck by a Japanese fishing boat in 1988 just off Peru’s coast.

A junior officer praying to the nun for help managed to prevent the sub from sinking and rescued trapped sailors.

Petkovic is the first Croatian woman to be beatified, the last step before possible sainthood.

John Paul’s day trip to Dubrovnik resonated among Croats, who remembered watching with horror as shells smashed into the city’s elegant Renaissance palaces, ancient fortresses and stone churches.

“The Pope encouraged the people of Dubrovnik during the attacks,” said Andrija Jarak, 33, as workers decorated a dais with flowers in yellow and white - the Vatican colours.

“Several times he received delegations from Dubrovnik on short notice, while others had to wait for a year. That meant so much to the people here during their worst times,” he said.

Organisers expected the city’s population of 40,000 to nearly double for today’s Mass. Dubrovnik teemed with police, who cleared the harbour of ships and yachts as a security precaution.

More than a decade after Croatia’s war, ethnic tensions remain and nationalism is resurging, worrying leaders who are struggling to put Croatia’s turbulent past behind it and prepare the country for membership in the European Union, perhaps as early as 2007.

“May those who exercise civil and religious authority never tire of trying to heal the wounds caused by a cruel war and of rectifying the consequences of a totalitarian system that for all too long attempted to impose an ideology opposed to man and his dignity,” the Pope said.