RELIGION : New Papal Itinerary to Begin in Africa

With his doctors’ blessing, Pope John Paul II is launching another rigorous year of foreign travel, returning to troubled Africa on the first of five foreign trips scheduled for 1993.

The eight-day swing, starting next Wednesday, will take the 72-year-old pontiff to Benin, Uganda and war-racked Sudan. It will be his 10th visit to Africa and the 57th foreign journey of a 14-year reign that has made him history’s most traveled world leader.

Six months after major surgery to remove a tumor from his intestine, John Paul travels with a clean bill of health following a checkup at the Vatican on Jan. 18, aides say.

“He will be making the usual hectic trip without any special medical precautions,” said papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro.

Frail, almost skeletal when he left the hospital last summer, John Paul has recovered strength, weight and color. He gets tired in the late afternoons, aides say, but he was lively and looked robust at his general audience last Wednesday and felt fit enough after Christmas to treat himself to a day’s skiing.

Africa, where the Vatican counts 92 million Roman Catholics, about 13% of the world total, is an abiding interest for John Paul. He believes that his church and the international community have an obligation to help strengthen what he calls “a link of prime importance between democracy, human rights and development.”

“Africa cannot be left to itself,” the Pope said this month in his annual address to diplomats. “On the one hand, urgent aid is essential in several areas of conflict or of natural disasters. And on the other hand, the vast movement toward democracy which has spread there calls out for support.”

All three countries that John Paul will visit are victims of violence and repression that have compromised development. Indeed, among the trip’s major themes will be papal appeals for religious tolerance, particularly to overcome frictions that frequently mar relations between Christians, Muslims and believers in traditional African religions.

Sudan, where the Pope will make a brief stop in Khartoum, the capital, on his way home without staying overnight, is the most politically explosive of his stops. In a country where 73% of 28 million people are Sunni Muslim and 9% are Catholic, a seemingly endless civil war rages between Arab north and black south, its horrors intensified by southern famine.

The Vatican has condemned the Sudanese government for seeking to impose Islamic law nationwide and for its repression of religious rights among black Christians in the south. Echoing concerns of some Sudanese bishops, Vatican analysts fear the papal visit might lend an air of legitimacy to the repressive and fundamentalist Khartoum government.

John Paul, by contrast, says his stop in Sudan “will give me the opportunity to take to all those who are suffering a message of reconciliation and hope, and above all, it will be an opportunity for me to encourage the sons and daughters of the church who, despite trials of every kind, are bravely continuing their journey of faith, hope and charity.”

West Africa’s Benin, where the Pope’s journey begins and from where large numbers of slaves were transported to the New World, was a Marxist dictatorship when the bishop of Rome visited briefly in 1982. The nation of 5 million, where about 70% of the people are animists, has been moving toward pluralism, however, since elections in 1991.

Uganda, by contrast, is still recovering from two decades of savagery. In one of the few Christian countries in black Africa--half the 20 million people are Catholic and a quarter Anglican--an estimated 800,000 perished in war and unrest between 1971 and 1986. Now, though, a new draft constitution is under study, and free elections are promised for 1994.

John Paul’s African journey will be followed by a breathless one-day, two-city visit to Albania on April 25 for the first ordination of new bishops there since the fall of communism. In June, he will make a weeklong visit to Spain. In August, he goes to Denver for an international youth festival on a trip that may also include stops in Jamaica and Nicaragua. In September, he makes his first visit to what was once the Soviet Union, calling on the Baltic republics of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

Travelin’ Man

On Wednesday, the Pope begins another year of foreign travel with his 10th visit to Africa, home to 92 million Roman Catholics. It will be the 57th foreign journey of his 14-year reign.