In Poland, Pope Stresses Need to Retain Christian Values : Religion: A quarter of a million believers gather to hear John Paul celebrate Mass. Visit is his first to his homeland in four years.

Pope John Paul II returned to his roots here in rural Poland on Monday in a lightning homecoming by helicopter marked as much by moral admonishment as favorite-son nostalgia.

Huge crowds welcomed the 75-year-old pontiff and left him misty-eyed on a nine-hour visit to three mountain towns in a picturesque region of southern Poland not far from his birthplace.

“I greet this land with particular emotion, because the history of my own family is also written here,” John Paul told a soggy, friendly crowd of about 250,000 jammed on Kaplicowka Hill in rich country mud here for a homecoming Mass.

It was the Polish Pope’s first visit home in four years, but his thoughts are never distant, he told cheering well-wishers: “Although I am far away, the affairs of this country are my affairs. Your joys are my joys. Your problems are my problems.”

For decades as priest, archbishop and avid hiker and skier, Karol Wojtyla became friends with the hills, the people and the churches around Skoczow, an agricultural village of about 16,000.

On a gray spring day, John Paul came back in a clattering flight of three helicopters from the neighboring Czech Republic to greet old friends and to lecture Poles on the need to preserve Christian values following the death of a communism he was instrumental in destroying.

“Where are we going? In what direction are our consciences heading?” the red-robed Pope asked.

With Polish President Lech Walesa applauding enthusiastically, John Paul reminded worshipers that under communism, when “consciences were suppressed,” millions of people were forced to act against their convictions. He said that since its collapse, though, there is a need for a “timely warning and exhortation to vigilance: that Polish consciences may not yield to demoralization, that they may not surrender to the trends of moral permissiveness. . . .”

The rights of conscience must be defended in Poland today as firmly as when the church spoke out in defense of Roman Catholics and nonbelievers alike, John Paul insisted.

“In the name of tolerance, an ever more powerful intolerance is actually spreading in public life and in the mass media,” he warned. “Believers are painfully aware of it. They notice the increasing tendency to marginalize them from the life of society: What is most sacred to them is sometimes mocked and ridiculed. These forms of recurring discrimination arouse great concern.”

John Paul hoped that after communism fell, newly freed East European countries would be a spiritual counterweight to a rich but morally decadent West. Instead, he has watched in alarm as newly liberated peoples have forsaken churches and Catholic teaching in favor of what he considers loose morals and vacuous Western consumerism, sometimes under old leaders in new guises.

One papal loyalist’s banner at the Mass here read: “Dear Christ, please forgive us for putting communism back in power.”

The Pope returned to his moral imperatives in stops Monday in Bielsko-Biala, where he chatted with Walesa and Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy, and at an encounter with villagers in Zywiec. There, he decried those responsible for “systematic secularism of society, attacking the church and ridiculing sacred values which have been at the foundations of the 1,000-year history of our nation.”

After almost 17 years in the papacy, John Paul remains Poland’s favorite Pole, but his politically active church has lost much of the respect it earned for its opposition to communism. The Polish Parliament has delayed ratification of a concord between Poland and the Vatican, signed by a previous government; as Poland moves, painfully, toward a market economy, how the church’s role should be defined in a new constutition is a source of lively political debate here.

“I know how high the costs are of the transformations that are taking place,” John Paul told worshipers Monday. “I know that it touches the poor and the weak in the most painful way. Unemployment and the impoverishment of the family are becoming true social plagues.”

Like newfound political freedoms, economic hardships are no excuse for moral relativism, John Paul said here in the birthplace of a martyred, 17th-Century priest he canonized over the weekend in nearby Olomouc, Czech Republic.

John Paul ended his three-day Czech-Polish trip Monday night. He is scheduled to venture abroad again next month with brief visits to Belgium and Slovakia to canonize more saints.