ROMANIA: DEATH OF A DICTATOR : Pope Prays for an E. Europe ‘Awakened From a Nightmare’

The triumph and tragedy of dramatic change in an Eastern Europe “awakened from a nightmare” dominated Christmas at the Holy See on Monday, with Pope John Paul II praying for East-West cooperation to build a peaceful Continent without frontiers.

Television viewers in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Yugoslavia and the Pope’s native Poland joined with millions in more than four dozen other countries on five continents to watch John Paul celebrate midnight Mass and to deliver his Christmas Urbi et Orbi message from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Excited pilgrims from around the world and tens of thousands of Romans surrounded a 90-foot Austrian Christmas tree and flanked a larger-than-life Nativity scene in the gigantic square before St. Peter’s to hear the traditional papal message “To the City and the World.”

John Paul offered a special blessing for Romania, the only one of the reforming East European nations where violence has accompanied change.

“In particular, bless at this hour, O Lord, the noble land of Romania, which is celebrating this Christmas in fear and trembling, with sorrow for the many human lives tragically lost, and in the joy of having taken once more the path of freedom,” John Paul prayed.

Standing in gold robes high above the cheerful crowd at the headquarters cathedral for the world’s 850 million Catholics, the Pope appealed for “the rejection of all barriers, be they of race, ideology or intolerance.”

As East Europeans and nations gripped by decades of dictatorship savored their first free Christmas since the start of World War II, John Paul called on Western Europe “to open her doors and her hearts” to help them.

“May she respond with the strength and generosity of her Christian roots to this very special moment of history, which the world is now experiencing, as if awakened from a nightmare, and opened up to a better hope,” the Pope prayed on a clear, almost spring-like day.

In an unprecedented interview with Italian television broadcast on Christmas Eve, John Paul observed that Eastern Europeans are “finally emerging as winners” after what he called “extraordinary events” beginning “in my Poland.”

Revolution in the East, together with the promise of re-established links to the Soviet Union following the visit of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to the Vatican earlier this month, are regarded here as major steps toward an oft-expressed papal dream of a Europe united by Christian ideals.

In his Christmas message to cardinals of the church on the state of the world, John Paul pledged support for a frontier-free Europe.

“There is no ideological system, political project, economic program or military system that can cancel the aspirations of millions of men and women,” the Pope said.

Yet the 69-year-old pontiff reminded the festive crowd at St. Peter’s on Monday, 2,000 years after the birth of a babe in a manger worshiped by much of the world as the Prince of Peace, that there is still much healing to be done.

“The world longs for peace, yet every day our brothers and sisters are dying in the present conflicts, in Lebanon, in the Holy Land, in Central America; they are dying in fratricidal struggles for supremacy, racial, ideological, economic; they are dying because of senseless and reckless courses of action,” John Paul lamented.