Pope Prays for Lasting Peace

Launching a year likely to challenge both his strength and his patience, Pope John Paul II prayed Sunday for lasting world peace in a New Year’s message lamenting wars that rage unchecked 50 years after the end of World War II.

The 74-year-old Pope’s voice rose in exasperation as he decried conflicts that have frustrated international peace efforts and his own calls for an end to bloodshed.

“Stop. Stop before the infant, stop before the newborn infant. Stop before Jesus Christ. Stop,” the Pope said in remarks from his study window to a soggy, smaller-than-usual crowd in St. Peter’s Square.

John Paul appealed directly for an end to violence in Chechnya, in “the martyred Balkans” and among “the peoples of Africa,” naming Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

“I ask those responsible for such grave situations to reflect on their consequences. A more just world can never be built with weapons in your hands,” he said.

At a solemn Mass earlier, John Paul, still recovering from a leg broken last spring, had walked slowly down the aisle at St. Peter’s Basilica using his crosier for support. He delivered his homily from a throne and sat for large parts of a high Mass marking his church’s simultaneous observance of the feast of the Virgin Mary and its 28th World Peace Day.

The stooped Pope, who has aged visibly in recent months, will test his stamina later this month on a grueling Jan. 11-21 trip to Asia, his first trip outside Europe since attending an international youth festival in Denver in September, 1993.

In an English-language greeting from his apartment, the Pope said, “A happy and blessed New Year to everyone: May the peace of Christ reign in our hearts and in our world.”

As ever, John Paul found reality far from his wishes, citing “dramatic hours” of fighting in the Russia-Chechnya conflict and “repeated violations of personal safety” in Banja Luka, a town in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina where Catholics were rounded up on Christmas Day by armed Serbs.