Pope’s Health Stands Up to the Rigors of the Road

“Just call me Karol,” the Pope said.

Just as such a spontaneous and improbable invitation to familiarity lit friendly cheers in Manila over the weekend, its echoes washed across the South Pacific and into Australia on Wednesday.

When 74-year-old Pope John Paul II arrived here Wednesday, completing the first week of his 11-day Asian trip, he had flown 22 hours across 10 time zones. By the time he went to bed here Wednesday, about noon Rome time, he had delivered 20 speeches in three countries.

At noon in Rome on Sunday--after 10 more speeches, a stop in Sri Lanka, another 10 time zones and 22 more flying hours--the Pope will probably recite midday prayers from his apartment window overlooking St. Peter’s Square.

Karol Wojtyla, the hard-headed Polish priest who became history’s most traveled Pope, is winning a bet that his health and a sore leg would stand up to the rigors of life on the road again. And he is feeling good about it.

“As you can see, I am once more here in Australia. In recent months, some people wondered if I would be able to come. But divine providence has allowed me to make this present pilgrimage,” John Paul told a welcoming crowd in Sydney.

Returning to Australia for the first time since 1986, John Paul made plain that there are still frequent papal miles to come.

“As long as God permits, I must continue to fulfill the ministry of St. Peter: to profess that Jesus Christ is Messiah and Lord, and to confirm my brothers and sisters in that true faith,” he said.

John Paul’s public appearances have been limited on the current trip as a concession to the slowly healing right leg he broke last spring. Lightning one-day visits to provincial centers, usually an integral part of papal trips, have been scrapped this time.

Still, there was big-city Manila in the Philippines and small-town Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea to excite guest and hosts alike.

“The Holy Father is holding up well. He has been charged up by the public response,” papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro told reporters after the Pope’s tumultuous welcome in Manila, which included the biggest crowds of his papacy.

“The Pope is in extraordinary form,” said Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, a participant at the World Youth Day celebrations in the Philippines. “Whatever health restraints he has had were not evident . . . here (in Manila). He has put his heart and soul into this journey, and it has clearly energized him.”

The Pope clearly believes that he has miles to go before he sleeps.

“He is determined to bring the church to the third millennium,” Mahony said. “His eyes are fixed on 2000.”