By VICTOR L. SIMPSON
The Associated Press
Wednesday, May 24, 2006; 3:08 PM
VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict XVI will be a man on a mission when he begins a visit to the Polish homeland of his predecessor Thursday, paying tribute to a pontiff so loved by his countrymen while pressing to keep the goals of his long papacy alive.
With stops at Pope John Paul II's birthplace and his Krakow Archdiocese where millions always turned out to greet Poland's favorite son, Benedict's four-day pilgrimage is a journey down memory lane.
Asking for prayers for his trip during his public audience Wednesday, Benedict turned to Polish pilgrims and proclaimed the motto of the trip, "Remain strong in the faith."
"For a people who feel orphaned by the death of John Paul, he will be welcomed warmly," said the Rev. Adam Boniecki, a Pole who worked for years with the late pontiff at the Vatican. "He is seen as a friend, collaborator and supporter of John Paul."
But there is another side for Benedict, pursuing some of John Paul's aims that were left incomplete upon his death last year. They include making predominantly Roman Catholic Poland an example for secular Europe, further pursuing Polish-German reconciliation from the wounds of World War II, and strengthening sometimes bumpy Catholic-Jewish relations.
In a particularly poignant moment, the visit will be capped by Benedict's stop Sunday at the Auschwitz-Birkanau death camp near Krakow, where Hitler's Nazi regime killed up to 1.5 million people, mostly Jews.
Organizers dropped initial plans for Benedict to ride through the Auschwitz gate under the infamous words "Arbeit Macht Frei" _ "Work Sets You Free" _ when it was recalled that Nazi soldiers drove through the gate while inmates walked. He will now arrive on foot.
John Paul stopped at Auschwitz during his first trip to Poland as pope in 1979, but a visit by the German pope carries further significance in efforts for closer Catholic-Jewish ties.
"I expect, like his predecessor, he will remind Christians of the unique debt that Christianity owes to its Jewish parent," George Weigel, an American biographer of John Paul, told The Associated Press.
In August, Benedict visited a synagogue in Cologne, Germany, that was destroyed by the Nazis. But his trip to a symbol of genocide is even more significant for a German who acknowledged serving in Hitler Youth as a teen and later deserted from the German army near the end of World War II.
Shortly after assuming the papacy last year, Benedict said he saw a "providential design" in the fact that a Polish pope was succeeded by a German one.
"Both popes in their youth _ both on different sides and in different situations _ were forced to experience the barbarity of the Second World War," Benedict said.
Polish and Vatican officials say Benedict plans to speak a few words in Polish or use Italian, but not make addresses in German, presumably to avoid offending elderly Poles who lived through the Nazi occupation.
Polish officials are so pleased with the visit they insist on calling it his "first foreign trip" since his pilgrimage to Cologne for the church's World Youth Day had long been planned by John Paul.
"Poland is his choice, the first trip he scheduled," the Polish ambassador to the Holy See, Hanna Suchocka, told a symposium on Polish-German reconciliation in Rome last week.
John Paul, who is credited with helping to bring down communism in Poland and across eastern Europe, had expressed disappointment the fledgling democracies were picking up the secular, consumeristic cultures of the West.
Weigel said the late pope was convinced Europe needed to rediscover its Christian roots.
"That was John Paul's conviction; that is Benedict's conviction, too. This I expect _ I hope _ that Pope Benedict will challenge Poland to be a leader in Europe's rediscovery of its unique civilizing accomplishment," Weigel wrote in a Polish newspaper last week.