Georgia Worshipers Applaud Pope as Visit Ends

Nearly 10,000 worshipers gave a farewell round of applause Tuesday to Pope John Paul II as he struggled with increasing signs of infirmity at the end of a five-day journey to India and Georgia.

Georgian President Eduard A. Shevardnadze led the accolade, rising from his seat and striding to the altar as the Roman Catholic Mass concluded. The pope stood to greet Shevardnadze, who kissed his left cheek, picked up a microphone and turned to the crowd.

“I want to thank his holiness again for this visit. I want to wish him good health and a long life,” the president said, leading a round of thunderous applause inside the Palace of Sports.

Catholics often applaud what the pope says at Mass. But Shevardnadze is believed to be the first political leader hosting John Paul--who has journeyed abroad 89 times in his 21-year reign--to clap for the pontiff himself.

It was a poignant encounter between two statesmen who played historic roles at the end of the Cold War, when Shevardnadze was the Soviet foreign minister and the pope was inspiring a Catholic uprising against Communist rule in his native Poland.

Ten years to the day after the Berlin Wall came down, John Paul and Shevardnadze issued a joint statement calling that milestone “a great conquest of the 20th century.” They said the wall had divided “not only two opposing philosophies but two different concepts of man and history.”

More important to the 71-year-old Georgian leader was a papal endorsement Tuesday for his former Soviet republic’s bid for full acceptance in European organizations. Georgia is an “outpost” of Europe, the pope said in his homily. “It has always looked toward the West and has made its own contribution to Christian Europe.”

Shevardnadze, a post-Soviet convert to Orthodox Christianity, was one of the few members of Georgia’s dominant faith to attend the indoor Catholic service. Catholics are a small minority in Georgia, and some Orthodox priests urged their followers to stay away.

The pope’s visit to Georgia was meant as a step toward healing the millennium-old rift between the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity. He praised both churches’ perseverance under the Soviet regime’s state-enforced atheism.

But Georgia’s Orthodox patriarch, Ilia II, bowed to protests within his church and refused to talk about Christian unity while the pope was here.

“We knew the problem before we came, but the door has been opened to us, and now we will see what the future will bring,” papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls told reporters.

The 79-year-old pope looked weary throughout the journey, which first took him across four time zones to India for meetings with his Asian bishops and an outdoor Mass in New Delhi’s subtropical heat. A chilly wind greeted his arrival Monday in this capital dating back to the 5th century, and he was twice seen trembling all over--during an airport welcoming ceremony and at Georgia’s Orthodox cathedral that evening.

For several years, John Paul has shown symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder; his left hand frequently shakes, and his speech is often slurred. But his episodes Monday, affecting both hands and arms as well as his head and much of his body, were among the most severe seen in public.

At one point in the cathedral, Bishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, his personal secretary, leaned over the seated pope and clasped both his hands to steady them.

Vatican officials don’t deny that John Paul has Parkinson’s, but they have never disclosed his diagnosis or treatment. Navarro said the pope felt “a big chill” at the airport and the cathedral but had experienced “no worsening” of his health.

The pope bounced back Tuesday, speaking clearly during his homily. Later, visiting St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, he walked up the aisle touching babies and chatting with nuns, who made him smile and laugh. He knelt at the altar and got up without assistance.

John Paul’s travels have been especially arduous since a 1994 fall in his bathroom that led to hip replacement surgery. He walks with a cane and climbs stairs with extreme difficulty. Yet history’s most-traveled pontiff, who arrived back in Rome on Tuesday night, perseveres and is planning visits to Iraq and Israel between now and March.

“Despite the limitations brought on by age, I continue to enjoy my life,” he wrote last month in a letter to the elderly of the world. “It’s wonderful to be able to give oneself to the very end for the sake of the kingdom of God.”