Pope Makes First Visit to Ex-Soviet Union : Religion: John Paul begins a weeklong trip to the Baltics with a stop in Lithuania. He opens with a plea for national reconciliation.

The big crowds were familiar: happy, jostling, waving, tossing flowers at the motorcade. But there was a special tang--a sense of history--to a cool autumn afternoon in Lithuania on Saturday, for that was when a papal dream came true.

In setting foot for the first time in the former Soviet Union, Pope John Paul II also satisfied a longstanding personal craving to visit Lithuania, which adjoins his native Poland and has shared long chapters of its history, faith and trauma.

“How deeply have I longed to visit your land, which is particularly dear to me,” John Paul told an airport crowd after kissing Lithuanian soil with “great emotion.”

Sounding a major theme for his weeklong visit to the three newly independent Baltic republics, John Paul appealed for national reconciliation as a path for building a strong democracy in the aftermath of failed communism.

“In your eyes,” he told local clerics, “there must be neither winners nor losers, but rather men and women who need to be helped to leave error behind, persons to be supported in their efforts to recover from the effects, including the psychological ones, of violence, abuse of power and the violation of human rights.

“You need to remind the ‘losers’ that it is not enough to adapt to changed social situations; instead what is required is sincere conversion and, if necessary, expiation. And the ‘winners’ need to hear continually the exhortation to forgiveness, so that there will come about that authentic peace that derives from following the gospel of mercy and of charity. . . ,” John Paul said.

Papal airport ceremonies come and go--in more than 100 countries over the past 15 years. But Saturday, as John Paul arrived for a four-day stop in Lithuania, history walked the tarmac with him.

Twice as Pope, in 1984 and 1987, John Paul asked permission to visit Lithuania. Both times he was refused by Soviet authorities. On Saturday, the president of an independent Lithuania, a democratically elected former Communist, bent low to kiss the Pope’s hand and to hail him as a hero.

“Throughout the years of our struggle for independence, we sensed that Your Holiness was praying for those among us who were tormented and humiliated, for the freedom of our country. We knew of your ardent fervor to be with us,” said President Algirdas Brazauskas.

“On the eve of Your Holiness’ visit, the last remaining foreign military units were withdrawn from Lithuania. After 54 years, our country has become absolutely free. This is a very significant and symbolic coincidence,” Brazauskas said, noting the withdrawal last week of the last former Soviet troops garrisoned here.

For a first papal visit to the former Soviet Union, where religion was a particular target of communism for so many decades, the choice of Lithuania was particularly appropriate.

Poland and Lithuania were part of the same medieval kingdom, and Vilnius, the capital, was part of Poland when Karol Wojtyla--now Pope--was a young man on the eve of World War II. Like Poland, Lithuania suffered successive Nazi and Communist conquests. About 80% of the 3.8 million Lithuanians are Catholics, and, as in Poland, the church became a bulwark for nationalism under Communist adversity.

In an airport speech televised nationally, John Paul told Lithuanians that one of his first acts as Pope in 1978 was to “pray for all of you” at the Lithuanian chapel of Our Lady of Mercy in the crypt under St. Peter’s Basilica.

“The Pope is very moved. He’s been thinking of this visit since the start of his papacy,” said Joaquin Navarro, the papal spokesman.

Tanned, looking rested and in obviously buoyant spirits, John Paul made a cameo appearance in the reporters’ compartment on his flight from Rome. With a thumbs-up and a big smile, he teased in Italian: “You need to learn three languages for this trip--Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian. The flight is only three hours. Get started.”

John Paul, who has been studying languages himself for weeks for a trip that will also take him to Latvia and Estonia, emerged from the plane at Vilnius to make the first of 13 addresses he will deliver in Lithuanian.

“Lithuania has been the silent witness of a passionate love for religious freedom. . . . In her efforts to bear witness to being a part of the Catholic Church, Lithuania has become, in the course of her long and difficult journey toward freedom, a land of confessors and martyrs,” John Paul said.

Later, the Pope met Lithuanian priests and nuns at the national cathedral, which was closed in 1950 and reopened in 1989 after long service as an art gallery.

The decades of repression were writ on the faces of the clerics who greeted John Paul, and on the building itself. Archbishop Julijonas Stepanovicius--”impeded in his mission” from 1961 to 1988--was buried in the cathedral after his death in 1991. In the church, the Pope prayed for Archbishop Mecislovas Reiny, arrested in 1947, who “died as a martyr in 1953” in a Soviet prison camp.

John Paul saluted the Lithuanian faithful who “have emerged from a long period in which the faith was cruelly tested, like precious metal in a crucible.”

He cautioned, though, that “yesterday’s trials will certainly be followed by new ones today and tomorrow,” and he warned Catholics to prudently confront those raised on official atheism.

“You will have to deal with indifference, misunderstanding, tendencies toward secularization and psychological isolation within a society that is undergoing profound transformations,” he said.

After communism’s fall, which was followed in 1991 by independence and democratic elections, John Paul told the Lithuanian priests that they must now stay out of politics.

They should avoid “tensions or suspicion between the church and representatives of political power,” he said. “With the return to democracy, it is to be hoped that relations between church and state will develop according to criteria of mutual respect.”

The 73-year-old pontiff will spend a busy day in Vilnius today, celebrating an outdoor Mass and meeting with academics, intellectuals and the leaders of other churches in Lithuania. He is scheduled to leave Lithuania on Wednesday for Latvia and to stop in Estonia on Friday en route back to Rome at the end of his 61st foreign trip.