Pope Calls for a Choice of Good Over Evil

Pope John Paul II ended a grueling six-day trip to Kazakhstan and Armenia on Thursday with a challenge to the modern world to make a choice between good and evil.

“Particularly today, the complexities and challenges of the international situation require a choice between good and evil, darkness and light, humanity and inhumanity, truth and falsehood,” the pope said in a joint statement with the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church before his departure for the Vatican.

The statement issued in Echmiadzin, Armenia’s holy city on the edge of Yerevan, the capital, did not make any specific reference to the tensions after the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

The Vatican has said that if the United States had to resort to force to protect its citizens from future threats, that could be seen as a legitimate self-defense.

But the pope has expressed concern that the world may be sliding toward war. A major theme of his trip, which took him first to mostly Muslim Kazakhstan and then to Christian Armenia, was peace between religions.

In Kazakhstan, he spoke of the Roman Catholic Church’s respect for Islam, and in Armenia he called for reconciliation among Christian denominations.

The 81-year-old pontiff looked extremely tired at times during the trip but held up relatively well on his busy schedule.

At a Mass on Thursday morning, he preached to a 10,000-strong crowd of Catholics and followers of the Armenian Apostolic Church, which broke away from the Vatican in the 6th century.

“I beg the Lord to forgive us our past failings against unity and to lead us to the love that overcomes all barriers,” he said in a homily read by an Armenian priest.