World

Pope To Visit Holy Land

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

November 17, 1999 / 7:37 AM EST / CBS

The Vatican announced officially on Wednesday that Pope John Paul II would visit the Holy Land in March next year.

Â"The apostolic trip to the Holy Land...is expected to take place in the last 10 days of March. The precise dates have not been set,Â" said Archbishop Cresenzio Sepe.

Sepe was speaking at a Vatican news conference on the calendar for the Pope and the Vatican during 2000 celebrations to mark the third millennium of Christianity.

Sepe said afterward that the pope was expected to visit Christ's birthplace in Bethlehem, Nazareth where he grew up, the Mount of the Beatitudes, the place near Lake Galilee where Christ is said to have read his Sermon on the Mount, and Jerusalem, where he was arrested and crucified.

Bethlehem is a Palestinian-ruled town in the West Bank and Nazareth is Israel's largest Arab city.

Churches in the Holy Land have said they will shut for two days in November to protest plans by Israel for a mosque to be built near the main Christian shrine in Nazareth, the town where Jesus grew up.

The mosque row has cast a cloud over the Pope's planned visit and chief Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls last month described the building plans as a Â"hindranceÂ" to a trip.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry welcomed the Vatican's announcement.

Â"We all hope that this visit is going to reinvigorate and support the spirit of peace and reconciliation between religions and the peoples of the Middle East,Â" said Effie Ben-Matityahu, a ministry spokesman.

Pope Paul VI visited the Holy Land in 1964, before Israel took over the entire city of Jerusalem in the 1967 war with the Arabs.

The pope also was considering a stop in Iraq during his planned millennium tour of Biblical sites. But the Vatican has not yet confirmed that visit.

An advance Vatican team was to leave Saturday for Iraq to plan for a visit in late January, the Vatican missionary news agency Fides said Wednesday, quoting church officials in Baghdad. The pope has said he wants to visit the ancient city of Ur, believed to be the birthplace of Abraham.

Vatican sources said the trip still was not confirmed and there still was a possibility that it would not take place at all.

Â"The delegation is going not so much to prepare for a trip but to find an agreement on whether a trip can take place,Â" one source said.

The U.S. and British governments and the Iraqi political opposition have expressed misgivings about such a trip on the grounds that it could strengthen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's position.

Plans for a visit to Iraq were to have included a brief stop on Egypt's Mount Sinai but if the Iraq trip goes ahead in January, the visit to Mount Sinai might have to be postponed because it would be too cold then, Vatican officials have said.