Pope Will Visit Church of Dreams

“If you build it, he will come.”

That promise by a voice from above in the movie “Field of Dreams” is all that one American farmer, a baseball fanatic, needs to hear. He plows under the corn, builds a diamond, and, lo, pretty soon it’s ghostly time to play ball.

Life imitating art? Listen to this.

In the West African country of the Ivory Coast, where the annual per capita income is $700 and students are rioting this week in frustration at one-man rule and a decade-long recession, a pious president has dug up the bush and built a $200-million church of his dreams. It is a St. Peter’s look-alike, nearly as big--and about 100 feet taller.

President Felix Houphouet-Boigny built it. And, with controversy snapping at his heels, Pope John Paul II will go to bless it.

An official announcement is pending, but papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro confirmed Friday that John Paul plans to pray at the Ivory Coast’s gigantic Basilica of Our Lady of Peace as the last stop on his trip to Africa in September.

Moreover, the financially strapped Vatican will accept the basilica as a personal gift from the octogenarian president and assume the $1.5-million yearly cost of maintaining it.

A stunning, out-of-time landmark in Yamoussoukro, the new administrative capital of the Ivory Coast, the marble-and-concrete, air-conditioned basilica took only three years to build.

Designed by an Ivorian architect, the Greco-Roman-style basilica is fronted by a sweeping colonnade of 128 Doric columns enclosing a piazza larger than the one before St. Peter’s here. Africa’s largest church seats about 2,000 fewer worshipers than St, Peter’s, but its 525-foot dome is the tallest in the world.

The Pope’s decision to visit ends a long, private debate at the Vatican about the wisdom of becoming directly associated with the basilica. The Vatican now joins those who regard the giant new church an important symbol of the faith for African Catholics and a major focus for future pilgrimages.

Africa bulks large in the Vatican’s vision of the 21st Century. John Paul has already made six pastoral visits to a continent where Catholicism and other Christian faiths are growing quickly. Already, there are about 75 million Catholics in Africa, and by the century’s end there may be as many as 400 million Christians.

Critics call the basilica a scandalously expensive white elephant in a young continent still struggling to satisfy basic human needs. They say the church was built by Houphouet-Boigny as a monument to himself.

A crocodile fancier whose 30-year rule has weathered scandal and strife, Houphouet-Boigny, 84, is foremost among the 1 million Catholics in a French-speaking coffee-and-cocoa nation of 10 million where most people are animists and almost a quarter are Muslims.

Houphouet-Boigny, who became a Catholic as an orphaned teen-ager, built the basilica without consulting the Vatican. He offered the church to the Pope at a meeting here last April but received no immediate response.

The president, whose tenure has been marked by charges of high-level corruption, says the financing and land came exclusively from his family.

Vatican sources acknowledge that it may prove discomfiting for a church that proclaims its fraternity with the poor to accept the opulent new monument. To have refused, though, would have been to risk offending Catholics throughout black Africa, they say.

As part of the Vatican’s acceptance of the basilica, the sources said, Houphouet-Boigny has agreed that an adjoining complex of buildings will be used as a center for education and health services.