Pope Begins Grueling 12-Day S. America Trip

Proclaiming a mission against hate, violence and lies, Pope John Paul II on Saturday launched a grueling visit to the back lands of South America that will likely test both his stamina and his patience.

His 12-day agenda includes a stop in La Paz, Bolivia, the world’s highest capital, and an encounter in Paraguay with the hemisphere’s most enduring dictator.

In 58 addresses and as many private meetings in 18 cities, the Pope will preach human rights in Asuncion to Paraguayan strongman Alfredo Stroessner and urge social justice for Andean Indians who are among the poorest South Americans. Drug barons will mark his passage in coca-growing areas of Bolivia. Peruvian rebels may try to mar his 39-hour visit to Lima to address a religious conference.

Polite Indifference

John Paul’s 37th foreign trip in a reign of about 10 years opened with polite indifference in secular Uruguay on Saturday afternoon after a 13 1/2-hour flight from Rome. By the time it ends, John Paul will have celebrated a birthday--he’ll be 68 on May 18, in Paraguay--and will have visited every major country in the Western Hemisphere except Cuba during his tenure.

The ninth papal visit to Latin America since 1978 underscores John Paul’s priority for a region which is Roman Catholic from Mexico to Chile and home to about 400 million of the world’s 840 million Catholics.

“The Holy Father cannot avoid the reality that by the end of this century, roughly half of the world’s Roman Catholics will pray in Spanish,” said papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro.

Uruguayans speak Spanish, but not many of them pray. About 80% of the 3 million people are nominal Catholics in a pastoral country that has been South America’s premier democracy for most of this century. But as the papal jet took off for Montevideo on Saturday, Vatican Radio noted ruefully that only about 4% of Uruguayans are churchgoers.

There has been strict separation of church and state in Uruguay for 70 years. By congressional decree, Holy Week is called Tourism Week in Uruguay and Christmas is Family Day. President Julio Sanguinetti, a respected democrat who welcomed the Pope at Montevideo Airport, says he believes in God but not in formal religion.

Smiling and appearing relaxed after the long flight from Rome, John Paul, his white robes blown by a chilly fall wind, shook hands with Sanguinetti, who did not bow or kiss the Pope’s ring as Latin American leaders often do, news agencies reported.

Sanguinetti welcomed the pontiff in “a spirit of tolerance, beyond religious beliefs,” and emphasized Uruguay’s defense of civilian and religious freedom “in all its imaginable extensions.”

John Paul spelled out his vision of the trip, his first abroad since visiting the United States last fall, in a radio message Saturday to the people of Uruguay. The Pope described himself as a “messenger of the good news who promotes in the world a struggle, without truce, of love against hate, unity against rivalry, generosity against selfishness, peace against violence, truth against lies. In a word: the victory of good over evil.”

It is not a lack of piety but a shortness of breath that will confront the Pope on his second stop in 12,000-foot-high La Paz, where altitude sickness, called soroche , often afflicts visitors. The pontiff will be accompanied by his personal Italian physician, Bolivian doctors and an oxygen bottle wherever he goes, but he refused appeals from his staff to ease up on his schedule.

Seven Bolivian Cities

John Paul will travel to seven cities in South America’s poorest country, meeting Indian subsistence farmers, out-of-work miners and lowland peasants who farm coca, as well as 81-year-old President Victor Paz Estenssoro.

He will also confront anger within his own church. Of the 834 priests among the 6.4 million Bolivians, only 200 are Bolivian. Most of the rest are American, German and Italian missionary priests. When the Pope recently named foreign priests to two of three open bishoprics, a group of Bolivian priests protested in an angry letter.

In the meantime, the Bolivian Church is trying to defuse social unrest that has grown during a period of austerity to combat runaway inflation, Times correspondent William R. Long reported from La Paz. Unions, students and opposition political groups have been staging strikes and protest marches. A hunger strike that drew broad support was lifted Saturday after successful mediation by the church, but on the eve of the Pope’s visit the political climate is, as ever, roiled.

From Bolivia, John Paul will call briefly next weekend at Lima to address a regional religious conference and to celebrate an outdoor Mass. It would not surprise anybody in Peru if Maoist guerrillas there observed the visit with some sort of symbolic attack like the ones that blacked out parts of Lima during the Pope’s visit in 1985.

The Pope’s last stop, landlocked Paraguay, will be the toughest politically for the Pope. Stroessner, who has ruled since 1954, is embarked on his eighth term in office after a disputed election in which he claimed about 90% of the vote.

In recent years, Stroessner has systematically muzzled opposition press and radio. Today, the main source of independent news for the 3.7 million Paraguayans is church-owned Radio Caritas.