RELIGION : Sentimental Trip to Launch a New Year of Papal Travels : John Paul will journey to Portugal to rekindle its missionary fervor. He’ll also commemorate the 1981 assassination attempt.

Globe-trotting Pope John Paul II launches a new year of foreign travel this morning with a sentimental journey that underlines the dangers and rewards of his pastoral zeal.

The Pope, who will be 71 next week, visits Portugal for four days in a bid to rekindle missionary fervor in that Roman Catholic nation and to commemorate the May 13, 1981, assassination attempt that nearly killed him.

On a visit that will take him offshore to the Azores and Madeira archipelagoes--and to Fatima, site of a major Marian shrine--he will pray with local church leaders as well as with acardinal and 18 bishops from Angola, a war-torn former Portuguese colony in southern Africa.

Anticipating the 500th anniversary next year of Columbus’ voyages to the New World, John Paul is calling for reinforced European missionary activity to growing Catholic communities in Africa and Asia. Church leaders in Lisbon say he will recall Portugal’s historic missionary contribution and ask for more of it.

In a country that is a member of the European Community and is rapidly joining the First World, John Paul is also expected to hearken to the theme of his recent encyclical urging Catholics to retain moral and spiritual values amid growing prosperity and to avoid blind consumerism.

The spiritual highlight of the 50th foreign journey of John Paul’s 13-year reign will come Sunday at Fatima, where, Catholics believe, the Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children on May 13, 1917.

In 1982, the Pope made a pilgrimage to Fatima to give thanks for what he considers Mary’s intervention in saving his life from an assassin’s bullets in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981.

On that 1982 visit to Fatima, a renegade Spanish priest named Juan Fernandez Krohn tried to stab John Paul with a rusty bayonet but was intercepted by bodyguards. Fernandez Krohn, an archconservative, recently completed his sentence in a Portuguese jail. Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who shot the Pope, is serving a life sentence in a Roman prison.

In 1984, the Pope gave a fragment of one of Agca’s bullets that wounded him to the bishop of Fatima and asked that it be kept at the shrine. It has been set amid pearls and diamonds in a crown, which the pontiff will place on the head of the statue of Our Lady of Fatima at the shrine Sunday.

Among the guests to meet the Pope at Fatima will be Lucia Santos, the only survivor of the three shepherd children Catholics honor as witnesses to the apparition. Santos, 84, is a nun in a Carmelite convent near the shrine.

The African prelates in Fatima are bound to invite the Pope to Angola, one of the few African countries he has missed. It will not happen soon, though.

Portugal, the first foreign journey of the year, will be followed quickly by a June 1-9 trip by John Paul to his native Poland. In August, he will pray one day in Poland, then make his first visit to Hungary. In October, he will make a wide-ranging swing through Brazil.

Latin America will again be prominent in the Pope’s 1992 travels, Vatican officials say. Beginning in the Dominican Republic, he will make at least one long trip, and possibly several shorter ones, through the region to mark the anniversary of Columbus’ discoveries.