To the Holy Land

"It has been the wish of my life to visit the Holy Land," wrote Giovanni Battista Montini, then Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan, to a bishop friend in November 1962. Last week, in his final address to the Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI surprised the prelates by announcing that he will indeed visit the holy places of Jordan and Israel on a three-day trip next month. It will be the first papal voyage outside Italy since Napoleon forced the unhappy Pius VII to take up residence at Fontainebleau in 1812, and the first time since the days of St. Peter that a reigning pontiff has set foot in the Holy Land.

The Vatican Secretariat of State quietly cleared the way for the visit last month. Pope Paul's announcement was warmly greeted by the government and press of Israel and Jordan, although presumably his trip will do more to help the two countries' tourist business than to patch up their political enmity. He will be visiting lands where archaeologists are searching out man's past, some of them using the Bible as a guidebook (see SCIENCE), and at a time when Greek Orthodox pilgrims swarm into Old Jerusalem for their Christmas. Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople called the visit "a very progressive act"; Moslem Sheikh Abdullah Alayli of Lebanon more ambiguously declared: "It is like Christ coming back once again to chase the Pharisees from the Temple." But the Pope clearly intended his voyage to be nonpolitical: he will fly to the Holy Land on January 4 with a handful of aides and security guards, visit Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem, return to Rome on January 6.

Does Paul have other trips in mind? Around Rome, it was rumored that he did, and that he might decide to attend the Eucharistic Congress in Bombay next November.

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