Pope Urges Lithuanian Youths to Make Moral Use of New Freedoms : Religion: The pontiff warns against quick fixes, economic or spiritual, to replace Marxist promises.

A visiting Pope John Paul II on Monday reached out to the young people of a rural nation embarked on radical social and economic transformation, urging them to make moral, “responsible” use of freedoms won with the collapse of communism.

Here in the conservative heartland of Lithuanian Catholicism, the Pope warned against quick fixes--economic or spiritual--to replace bygone Marxist promises.

“Happiness cannot be found by those who, looking only to themselves and listening to the message of false prophets, set off on the road leading to consumerism, to moral permissiveness, to lifestyles which indulge selfishness, to religious indifference,” John Paul lectured at a meeting with young people in this graceful old river city about 60 miles west of the capital, Vilnius.

On the third day of his weeklong pilgrimage to the three newly independent Baltic states--his first visit to the former Soviet Union--John Paul flew by helicopter Monday across a land undergoing revolutionary reforms that are at once peaceful and painful.

Lithuania, which yanked itself away from half a century of Soviet rule in 1991, has been moving more slowly than Latvia and Estonia in implementing a market economy. Nationalists who spearheaded independence were turned out of office in favor of former Communists in elections this year, largely because of economic issues.

“Life in Lithuania is a lot better but materially a lot worse,” said papal admirer Tomas Sernas, who has been in a wheelchair since being wounded by Soviet troops on the eve of independence.

In a country that lives largely off the land, the number of small farmers far exceeds the number of tractors. Families harvest crops by hand and horse-drawn plows are used for tilling.

Many Lithuanian cities are ramshackle, and the bright countryside viewed by the Pope on Monday was stained by industries bleeding noxious smoke into the sky.

At the outdoor Mass here in Kaunas, John Paul made an appeal for the Earth, one of the underlying themes of his Baltic trip.

“The Earth is renewed through man--God made him in his image and likeness and gave him the Earth as his inheritance,” the Pope said. “Thus he participates in the work of renewing the face of the Earth. Unfortunately, he is also capable of deforming and destroying this face, as is shown by the wars and ecological disasters that cause so much and such great damage to man and the habitat that is vital for the planet.”

To the young Catholics who released 300 white doves to salute his arrival, he said: “The long years when you were deprived of fundamental liberties are over. Your country has now embarked, with great effort, upon a better future. Where authoritarianism once reigned, now there is room for responsible freedom; where distrust toward others was once encouraged, now there is growing understanding and toleration; where materialism tried to suppress the faith, now there is religious freedom, which brings with it respect for both God and man.”

What is essential now, the Pope said, is a reassertion of Catholic values: “Be the first to respond to the push for the new evangelization which your country, Europe and the whole world urgently need,” he urged.

To be avoided at all costs, the Pope said, are “those all-encompassing ideologies which claim to provide an overall understanding of life, yet one detached from God and his eternal will, which alone guide us to salvation. . . .

“Behind some of the factors affecting modern youth, like selling and consumption of drugs, the search for artificial paradises, the marketing of sex and pornography, violence and juvenile delinquency, the delusions of racism, suicide--there lies hidden a profound and alienating emptiness, a crisis of values which leads inevitably to a grave loss of moral direction,” John Paul said, delivering the same warning he made to participants last month at an international youth ceremony in Denver.

The 73-year-old pontiff concludes his four-day visit to Lithuania today with a Mass in the provincial city of Siauliai and prayers at a shrine in Siluva. On Wednesday, he continues his Baltic swing with a two-day visit to Riga, Latvia, before returning to Rome via Tallinn, Estonia, on Friday.