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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

A Plea For An Overdue Peace Pact

William D. Montalbano Los Angeles Times

Pope John Paul II peered across a horizon of mud and umbrellas Sunday with his gaze fixed on the bloody religious history of Eastern Europe.

Beyond the chilled crowd of pilgrims, the pope pictured Catholic and Protestant armies hurtling through mangled crops and devastated villages, killing for about two centuries in the name of God. Then the pope proposed an overdue peace treaty between discordant Christians.

“Today I, the pope of the church of Rome, in the name of all Catholics, ask forgiveness for the wrongs inflicted on non-Catholics during the turbulent history of these peoples. At the same time, I pledge the Catholic Church’s forgiveness for whatever harm her sons and daughters suffered,” he said.

Religious divisions, typified by discord over the pope’s canonization Sunday of a controversial Catholic priest, persist today in Czech lands that were the site of a series of wars from the 15th to 17th centuries between Protestant Bohemian princes and Catholics supporting the Viennabased Hapsburg monarchy.

The pope called for “a new beginning in the common effort to follow Christ” in “this land where in the past Christians have fought violently for religious reasons.”

The pope spoke outside Moravia, on a battleground of the Thirty Years War in the 17th century.

The papal initiative is part of his campaign to draw religions together to celebrate the third millennium of Christianity in the year 2000.