Pope Pleads in Broadcast Mass for Bosnia Peace : Balkans: Forced by the conflict to cancel his visit to Sarajevo, the pontiff denounces ‘absurd, fratricidal war.’

“Enough war! Enough destructive rage!” the Pope implored Thursday from an altar that should have been in Sarajevo.

Preaching to faithful he didn’t meet in a city he couldn’t reach, Pope John Paul II lamented “the desolate spectacle of a sinking humanity” and prayed for peace in the Balkans.

“The dead of Sarajevo pray with us,” the Pope said in Serbo-Croatian. “All the victims of this cruel war in the light of God are praying for the survivors; that they may have reconciliation and peace.”

Forced by unflagging war to abandon a trip to the Bosnian capital scheduled for Thursday, John Paul nevertheless delivered the homily he had prepared for his hoped-for Mass there.

“A just peace should be reached as soon as possible. Peace is possible, if the priority of moral values over the claims of race and force are recognized,” he said.

John Paul’s stage Thursday was not, as had been planned, an Olympic skating rink in range of snarling artillery batteries, but a Baroque courtyard in the summer papal palace at Castel Gandolfo near Rome. Still, at an emotional Mass transmitted live to Bosnia, John Paul changed not a comma.

“Our Father . . . , I, Bishop of Rome, the first Slav Pope, kneel before you crying out, ‘Deliver us--from plague, hunger and war!’ I know that many are united with me in this plea. Not only here in Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but in all of Europe and beyond, “ the Pope said.

Since Bosnia’s war began in 1992, John Paul has repeatedly appealed for peace in Sarajevo, the urban vortex of Balkan bloodshed that he called Thursday an “absurd, fratricidal war.”

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Bosnian Serbs whose forces are besieging Sarajevo charge that the Vatican sides with predominantly Roman Catholic Croats in the Balkan caldron. John Paul will begin a weekend visit to Croatia on Saturday, but his own sympathies were manifest in Thursday’s homily:

“God is on the side of the oppressed,” he said. “He is beside the parents who cry for their murdered children; he hears the impotent cry of the defenseless and downtrodden; he is in solidarity with women humiliatingly violated; he is near to refugees forced to leave their land and their homes. Do not forget the sufferings of families, of the elderly, widows, the young and children. It is his people who are dying.”

The Pope’s advisers had begged him for weeks to abandon the Sarajevo trip. But John Paul stubbornly refused, backing out Tuesday only after he became convinced that his presence might stir violence.

John Paul’s determination to go to Sarajevo someday is unslaked, though--and so is his anger.

“There must be an end to a barbarism of this kind! Enough war! Enough destructive rage!” he thundered. “It is not possible to any longer tolerate a situation that produces only the fruits of death: killings, destroyed cities, disrupted economies, hospitals lacking medicines, the sick and elderly abandoned, families in tears and torn apart.”

John Paul pleaded for the warring factions to forgive one another and to rebuild peacefully.

At the end of Thursday’s Mass, John Paul offered “the kiss of peace” to the patriarch and bishops of the Serbian Orthodox church, and sent a greeting to Serbs: “I want . . . to embrace spiritually the entire Serbian people of Bosnia-Herzegovina to whom I offer my heartfelt wishes of prosperity in harmony and in solidarity.”