Pope Issues Plea for ‘Social Peace and Freedom’

Speaking from a gaudy Christian altar erected amid controversy on a beach revered by Hindus, Pope John Paul II on Saturday issued a plea for “social peace and freedom, including freedom of conscience and religion.”

The pontiff’s platform for a prayer ceremony on Shangumugham Beach was erected over the protests of local Hindus who objected because it stands immediately next to the ghat (shrine) where for centuries the Maharajah of Travancore has walked naked into the Arabian Sea in a solemn annual ritual.

The protesters feared that the three-story altar platform with a cross-shaped red, white and gold pagoda on its top, would become a permanent fixture, sacred to local Christians because the Pope had set foot on it. They withdrew plans to demonstrate during the Pope’s prayer service only after a written promise from civil authorities to demolish the structure.

“The prayer of our Lord for perfect unity” should be their constant goal, he told a crowd of about 100,000 gathered in crude wood-post corrals on the wide, white sand beach. Among them were worshipers from at least five Christian sects, three of them Catholic and two Orthodox.

Diplomatically embracing them all, as he has other elements of the widely factionalized Christian church of India during eight days of a 10-day visit to the country, the pontiff emphasized the need for greater social justice and carefully avoided mention of caste and human exploitation that are burning issues among the disparate groups.

Earlier Saturday, the pontiff flew to Kottayam, another city in the south India coastal state of Kerala, where he beatified two Indians, a 19th-Century priest and a 20th-Century nun of the Syro-Malabar Church, an Indian Catholic sect that claims its origin from the evangelizing of Christ’s doubting disciple St. Thomas in the 1st Century. It was the first time a Roman pontiff had ever presided over a Syro-Malabar Mass.

Beatification is a preliminary step toward sainthood.