Pope John Paul on Weekend Visit to
former Yugoslav Republic of SloveniaLJUBLJANA, May 15 (Reuters) — Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to turn out for a three-day visit this week by Pope John Paul to the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia. "This is an important historic event for Slovenia, we are really looking forward to it," Janez Gril, a spokesman for the Slovenian Archbishops' Conference, told Reuterss.
Gril said organisers were expecting up to 300,000 people in the country of two million to attend masses and rallies to be held by the Pope in Ljubljana, Postojna and Maribor from Friday to Sunday. Thousands more were likely to line the routes to be taken by the Popemobile and to crowd into town centres.
Solemn religious ceremonies will give way to a celebratory youth rally on Saturday, marking the Pope's 76th birthday. The Slovenia visit, the Pope's 71st foreign trip since he became Pontiff in 1978, is his second to ex-Yugoslavia.
He spent two days in Zagreb in September 1994 but was forced to cancel a flight into besieged Sarajevo after Bosnia's Orthodox Christian Serbs, who saw the Vatican as favouring their adversaries, refused to guarantee his safety. Devout Roman Catholics will regard the Pope's visit as crowning Slovenia's nationhood, almost exactly five years after Ljubljana declared independence from Yugoslavia.
Slovenia fought a brief but bloody 10-day war against the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav army before more protracted conflicts broke out in neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia. According to a recent opinion poll carried out for Slovenia's leading daily Delo, nearly a fifth of Slovenians believed that the Pope's trip is the most important visit by any foreigner to Slovenia.
But seven percent said the visit was too expensive and nearly 30 percent believed security measures were exaggerated. The visit is expected to cost Slovenia more than one billion tolars ($7.3 million). Much of the cash will be spent on deploying around 8,000 police in the country's biggest security operation.
Church officials said the Pope was expected to signal his intention to beatify 19th-century Slovenian bishop Anton Slomsek in the near future and pray at his grave in Maribor. They said one of the reasons for the beatification, the penultimate step on the road to sainthood, was that many believers who prayed to Slomsek had their wishes answered.
Not all Slovenians, however, are thrilled by the visit. A civil action group led by Ziva Vidmar plans to hold a demonstration against the Pope on Saturday. Vidmar said the protest would focus on what she called discrimination against women by the Catholic church and the Pope's stand against abortion and contraception. She is a member of the United List of Social Democrats, the former Communist Party, but her party has not backed the demonstration.
Although this will be the first offical Papal trip to Slovenia, one other Pope has visited the country before. Pius VI spent a night in Maribor in 1783 on his way to Vienna.
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