c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ At first glance, Pope John Paul II’s 31-hour visit to St. Louis next week (Jan. 26-27) seems little more than a favor to an old friend and colleague, Archbishop Justin Rigali, the Missouri city’s reigning prelate.

But there’s more. For the 78-year-old John Paul, whose health is declining, the St. Louis stopover enroute home to Rome from Mexico City could well be his last visit to the United States.

Given the nation’s status as the world’s lone superpower, the pope is not about to pass up an easy opportunity to impress upon Americans once again some of the familiar moral themes that have dominated his pontificate.”The United States is the dominant military, economic and media power of the day,”said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, editor-in-chief of the Jesuit magazine America.”That being the case, the pope wants to get his message across to Americans any way he can at any time he can.”He’ll be just next door, so why not St. Louis? Anytime the pope can come to the United States it’s important because the United States is important and the pope is important.” In Mexico City, where he will arrive Friday (Jan. 22), John Paul will sign an”apostolic exhortation”to formally close the Synod of Bishops Special Assembly for America. The exhortation is his response to recommendations suggested by the gathering.

The synod was a monthlong meeting in 1997 of more than 220 bishops from North, South and Central America at which issues common to the hemisphere were discussed and proposals put forth. It was one of a series of similar regional gatherings held to prepare the Roman Catholic Church for the next century.

In St. Louis, the pope has no such official mission. For John Paul, St. Louis is a pastoral visit to”the Rome of the West,”as the city is known because of its pivotal role in the development of Catholicism in North America. The 150-year-old archdiocese is considered the”mother diocese”from which 45 other dioceses _ from Denver to Little Rock, and from Great Falls, Mont., to Oklahoma City, Okla. _ were created.

This will be John Paul’s fifth visit to the United States as pope (not counting two quick stops in Alaska while traveling between Europe and Asia in the 1980s).

Visiting St. Louis is a chance for the pope to bestow honor on Rigali, who spent most of three decades working in the Vatican in various posts prior to John Paul’s assigning him to St. Louis in 1994.”I don’t know if St. Louis would have been a stop if not for Archbishop Rigali,”said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a papal visit communications official.

In St. Louis, which he previously visited in 1969 while still a cardinal, John Paul is likely to reiterate the chief theme that emerged from the American bishops’ synod.

The theme may be summarized as the moral responsibility of wealthy North Americans toward Latin America’s less-fortunate poor.”I suspect an emphasis on the north helping the south, on lifting the international debt crushing Latin American economies, on compassionate policies toward immigration and so on,”said Walsh.

The pope is also likely to address another of his ongoing themes: his concern that Americans _ Catholics and others _ suffer a disconnect between daily life and religious teachings about justice and moral conduct.”He wants people to reconnect, to overcome their rupture between religion and culture,”Walsh continued.”I’d look for him to address that, too.” The Monica Lewinsky scandal broke last year just as the pope was about to begin his historic visit to Cuba. In St. Louis, the pontiff is scheduled to meet with President Clinton, whose Senate impeachment trial is likely to still be underway.

But don’t expect the pope to take public note of the situation.”I doubt the pope would insert himself into that morass,”said Reese.”The pope deals with the chief of state of the nation he is in, whatever their moral standing.” The Vatican has also taken moral issue with U.S. policy toward Iraq, opposing the various American bombing campaigns and the economic embargo that John Paul sees as punishing to innocent Iraqi citizens, but not Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Iraq may be addressed by the pope, said Walsh. Likewise, he may also touch on U.S. economic embargoes against Cuba and Libya, both of which are also opposed by the Vatican.

Pushing 80, John Paul still maintains a travel schedule that would tire many people who are decades his junior.

Upon arriving in St. Louis, for example, he will go right from the airport to a rally for 20,000 youths at Kiel Center. Also squeezed into the visit are a Mass for an expected 95,000 people at the Trans World Dome and an adjoining convention center, a lunch with U.S. bishops, three motorcades during which the pope will wave to adoring crowds from the safety of the popemobile, and a speech at a Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis prayer service.

The pope is believed to suffer from Parkinson’s disease. His step has visibly slowed and his words are delivered with less vigor. Although he has scheduled another trip to Poland for later this year, it appears probable that before long John Paul will have to curtail his travel schedule.

Church officials are loath to speculate publicly about the pope’s ability to keep traveling widely.”I don’t want to be seen as keeping some sort of death watch,”said one priest, who asked not to be quoted.

However, privately they say that, barring some medical turnaround, this may indeed be the pope’s last visit to the United States.

But Walsh insisted John Paul cannot be counted out just yet.”I was asked in 1993 and 1995 when he visited the United States if those would be his last visits here,”she said.”But they weren’t. So who knows? But if you look at his schedule on the road, you’ll notice they’ve been getting lighter.”

DEA END RIFKIN