Pope to Start 25th Trip Abroad Saturday : 4-Nation Latin Journey Expected to Mix Social, Religious Issues

Pope John Paul II will renew his extensive Latin America travels Saturday--his 25th papal pilgrimage abroad--and is expected to strike out at human rights abuses, strife in Central America, oppression of the poor and the creeping infiltration of Marxist ideas in his own church.

The pontiff will visit Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago in 12 days of hopscotching across mountain peaks and the Amazon Valley, between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Although the Pope last Sunday characterized his sixth papal visit to Latin America in six years as simply a pastoral one in response to longstanding invitations, he indicated that his message will be as much social as religious.

‘Justice, Solidarity’ “I feel incumbent on me as Peter’s successor the responsibility of leaving nothing untried to serve the cause of justice and solidarity,” he said before reciting the weekly Angelus prayer at St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican.

The official Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, said that while he will visit only three mainland nations and the mostly non-Catholic West Indian island country of Trinidad and Tobago, the pontiff will speak to all of Latin America, home of half of the world’s almost 800 million Roman Catholics.

“His mission embraces the people of the whole continent” and contains “a message of liberation for the Latin American man,” the newspaper declared in a front-page editorial this week.

During his first stop in Venezuela, John Paul is expected by some Vatican observers to support peace proposals for Central America. The 64-year-old pontiff also is expected to address social inequality and poverty in the northeast coastal country, whose oil riches have produced the highest standard of living in South America but have left many Venezuelans abjectly poor.

In Ecuador, John Paul will cross the Colorado-sized country on the Pacific Coast, touching down in four cities that have been jolted by recent riots over price rises. Ecuador also enjoyed an oil boom in the ‘70s, but the 1982 collapse in prices has brought about economic belt-tightening.

The Pope’s next stop will be Peru, where security fears concerning guerrilla activities by the Maoist revolutionary group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) have prompted authorities to mobilize 20,000 paramilitary police to protect him.

Guerrilla Heartland Army troops will join the security operation when he stops briefly but symbolically in the southeastern Peruvian city of Ayacucho, in the heartland of the four-year guerrilla war. The guerrillas have killed hundreds in the area, and the international human rights organization, Amnesty International, says more than 1,000 people have disappeared there after being detained by police and the military.

“The historic importance of yesterday and the tragic reality of today led John Paul to select the city as one of his stops,” said Vatican radio, noting that Ayacucho also was the site of the decisive battle that won Peru independence from Spain in 1824.

The plight of the Indians in many Latin American countries is expected to be addressed by the pontiff when he travels briefly to the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco, 11,200 feet high in the Andes.

Probably most important to him during the Peruvian visit, though, will be the controversial topic of “liberation theology,” a revolutionary approach to defining the church’s mission to the poor and downtrodden that was born in Peru and has spread throughout the Third World.

Although the Vatican and the Pope have refrained from rejecting the movement entirely, they have condemned its Marxist elements, including the concept of class war. One of the leading liberation theologians is a Peruvian, Father Gustavo Gutierrez, whose writings the Vatican has ordered Peruvian bishops to scrutinize for error. The bishops, while endorsing the Vatican position against Marxist elements of the theology, have so far withheld condemnation of the priest.

John Paul, meanwhile, has begun to preach his own theology of liberation through Christian salvation as a counterweight to the radical elements of the new movement.

With 45 speeches in 17 cities, public appearance schedules of up to 16 hours a day and a 12-day itinerary that will see him flying from sweltering sea-level jungles to chilly, oxygen-poor mountaintops, the pilgrimage promises to be among the most arduous that the pontiff has undertaken.

Later in the year, Vatican sources expect the pontiff to launch another South American tour to Chile and Argentina, and he has expressed a desire to keep returning to the Western Hemisphere because he would like to visit, among other countries, Communist Cuba.