Pope Starts Tour, Places Conditions on Soviet Visit

Pope John Paul II today flatly ruled out visiting the Soviet Union unless its leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, first invites him to visit Roman Catholic communities in Lithuania and the Ukraine.

The pontiff also minimized the Vatican’s differences with liberal elements of the American Catholic church that surfaced at a U.S. bishops conference last week. He said he would welcome a meeting with U.S. bishops before setting out on his visit to America next September.

In his first comment on the American church since the bishops conference heard a warning of “dangerous divisions” between the Vatican and U.S. Catholics, the pontiff suggested that the divisions have been exaggerated.

‘One Creates Divisions’

“Sometimes one creates divisions, divisions which don’t exist . . . by talking, by writing,” John Paul told reporters on his chartered Boeing 747 as he set out on a two-week pilgrimage to Bangladesh, Singapore, Fiji Islands, New Zealand, Australia and the Seychelles.

Although no official plans have been released, it is widely expected that Gorbachev will visit John Paul in Vatican City when he goes to Rome next January and that he will invite the Pope to reciprocate with a visit to Moscow.

But the Pope told reporters on his plane that “I won’t even talk about a trip to Russia. It would be my duty to make a trip to Lithuania.”

Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Pope’s spokesman, later explained that the pontiff has absolutely ruled out a visit to the officially atheist Soviet capital unless he is first asked to visit the two areas of the Soviet Union that are predominately Catholic: Lithuania and the Ukraine.

Sending a Message

Navarro-Valls repeated the papal condition several times, explaining that the Pope wants to send a message to Gorbachev and that the press is the only channel that he has to communicate with the Soviet leader.

Concerning the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which was torn over the question of Vatican strictures against one of its own, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, the Pope said only that the final statement of the conference president, Bishop James W. Malone of Youngstown, Ohio, “was correct.”

Malone’s statement upheld papal authority over Hunthausen, who had been stripped of much of his authority by the Vatican because of his liberal views concerning marriage, divorce and homosexuality.

‘Poor, Simple, Religious’

John Paul said he decided to begin his Pacific-Australia-Indian Ocean pilgrimage with a stop in largely Muslim Bangladesh “because they are good people--poor, simple and religious people. It is interesting that in a country like Bangladesh, they would like to see the Pope.”

“Many linguistic, cultural and religious groups live side by side (in Bangladesh),” he told a crowd upon his arrival here today, adding, “I greet my brethren of the Islamic faith, aware of the bonds that unite us in obedience to the one, all-powerful God and Creator, the Lord of our lives.”

Despite the festivity for the Pope’s arrival, some Muslim spokesman have criticized Christian missionaries in recent says, in apparent reference to his visit.

The Bengali-language newspaper Inquilab (Liberty) in Dhaka charged Monday that Christian missionaries are exploiting the poverty of Bangladeshis.

Mohammadullah Hafezi Hujur, president of the Muslim fundamentalist Khilafat movement, issued a statement Monday saying, “Islam provides freedom to all religions, but this does not mean they will brook the proselytizing activity of Christian missionaries.”