Pope Blasts Mafia in Weekend Sicily Visit : Italy: John Paul urges citizens to ‘rise up’ against organized crime. The trip will test his recovery from a leg injury in April.

Inveterate traveler Pope John Paul II went back on the road Friday, launching a barnstorming weekend through Sicily that promises to be a test for his slow-healing leg and a trial for the Mafia.

“Catania, rise up and cloak yourself in light and justice,” the Pope urged Friday night in a strong-voiced opening sally against organized crime at a meeting with citizens in front of a cathedral that was begun 900 years ago.

History’s highest-mileage Pope flew to Catania from Rome on a muggy, hazy evening to keep a promise. He had planned to visit at the end of April but broke his right leg in a bathroom fall at his Vatican apartment the night before he was to leave.

Mounted anew on his Popemobile on Friday, he waved to happy crowds lining the streets of this prosperous but Mafia-beset port city overlooked by the brooding mass of Mt. Etna, Europe’s biggest volcano.

“Too often and for too long the children of this community have suffered the humiliation of being written off as residents of a decayed and violent city, dominated by organized crime and made unlivable,” the Pope thundered.

John Paul brought an appeal for action on his first call in Catania and his first in Sicily since May, 1993, when he lambasted the Mafia in one of the strongest addresses of his papacy.

With a large and friendly crowd cheering his every move Friday, the 74-year-old pontiff returned immediately to the hunt.

“My thoughts are with your community on its difficult and tiring road to moral and social growth, hoping to find a new harmony, leaving behind the forms of suffocation and corruption manipulated by some at the expense of many,” he told Sicilians.

The Pope dismisses organized crime, a stubborn and deeply rooted fact of Sicilian life, with the scorn he reserves for issues such as abortion and euthanasia. Silence will not do, the Pope says. He demands that Sicilians rise up in active opposition.

“Time is running out and does not allow inert waiting or timorous mediocrity,” he said in a speech based on Christ’s biblical response to a cripple who asked for help: “Rise up and walk.”

It was John Paul’s first venture beyond Vatican walls since he canceled an October visit to the United States to allow further time for recuperation. Since then, he has worked a full load as an administrator but skipped a number of scheduled pastoral events that would have kept him on his feet for extended periods.

Arriving in Catania on an Italian air force executive jet, John Paul descended the steep nine steps from the plane with fierce concentration, grasping handrails in both hands and placing both feet on each step, one deliberate shuffle after another.

John Paul’s Sicilian visit has been pruned to accommodate his leg. He will say Mass here this morning and, after a fairly relaxed day, will journey to the ancient city of Syracuse, where he will dedicate a shrine Sunday before returning that night to Rome.