Million Attend Mass by Pope in Buenos Aires

Pope John Paul II ended an exhausting South American pilgrimage and began the most sacred week in the Roman Catholic calendar Sunday with a spectacular Palm Sunday Mass for a million worshipers in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires.

The multitude, many of its members waving olive branches and papal flags, packed nearly a mile of the broad Avenida 9 de Julio, the city’s main thoroughfare that Argentines boast is the widest boulevard in the world.

As the solemn papal procession was beckoned toward a towering altar platform in the middle of the boulevard by white-robed priests sweeping the air with palm fronds, the cheers of what police estimated to be a million voices echoed off surrounding high-rise buildings.

Visibly Cheered

The display visibly cheered the Pope, who had been met by disappointingly small crowds in the last day or two in his other appearances in this city.

For the pontiff and the church, it was a historic occasion because it marked the first time in modern church history that a Roman pontiff has begun Holy Week services outside of Rome. Holy Week is the period from Palm Sunday until Easter, when Christians mark with sacred rituals Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, his crucifixion and their belief in his resurrection.

Typically, for the beginning of Holy Week, John Paul confined his sermon to a discourse on the meaning of Jesus’ final days, declaring, “The center of Christ’s whole life was his death on the cross; that was the fundamental and definitive act of his messianic mission.”

However, in two other brief public appearances before he departed for Rome in the early evening, the pontiff dealt with temporal themes.

In a talk to Argentine bishops, who have been waging an uphill battle against a proposed divorce law that is favored by a large majority in this overwhelmingly Catholic nation, he lamented the growing secularization of society. He exhorted the bishops to stand fast behind the traditional teachings of the church, particularly those concerning the family.

‘Weakening of Culture’

To a gathering of Argentine intellectuals that was boycotted by some of the country’s leading cultural figures, he complained of “philosophical systems which pretend to make of man a rival of God” and bemoaned what he called modern society’s “human decadence and progressive weakening of culture.”

Leading writers and artists were among those who stayed away from the meeting to protest the pontiff’s failure to publicly decry the silence of top church figures during a violent period of repression by military governments in the 1970s, when thousands of government opponents disappeared and many were tortured or killed.

Among the boycotters was Adolfo Perez Esquivel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980, who scorned the papal visit as “a beautiful tourist trip” rather than a pastoral mission.

As he often does, John Paul avoided plunging directly into the bitter human rights issue.

Refers to Rights Issue

However, after sensing the dismay that his silence was causing among many Argentines, he added a brief line to a speech to youths Saturday night, acknowledging the repression and human rights violations of the past for which military men have been put on trial.