c. 2000 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ Expressing”deep emotion,”Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass today in the Chapel of the Cenaculum, revered by Christians as the Bible’s Upper Room where Jesus met with his disciples for the Last Supper before his death on the cross.

Church bells pealed as the Roman Catholic pontiff was driven along the narrow streets of the old city of Jerusalem on the fourth day of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in mild and sunny weather.

“Celebrating the Eucharist in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, we are united with the church of every time and place,” the pope told the leaders of the six Catholic rites present in Jerusalem and a handful of cardinals, archbishops and other prelates from the Vatican.

The private mass in the Cenaculum, as the site is known, was a high point of the pope’s spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Land to mark the start of the third millennium of Christianity. Christians have believed since the end of the 3rd century that this was the room where Jesus celebrated the first Eucharist and created the ordained priesthood.

Later in the day the pope was to meet with Israel’s chief rabbis and president and Orthodox and Muslim leaders and visit a site dedicated to the memory of a 20th century tragedy, the extermination of 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.

In his homily in the Cenaculum, John Paul noted that the Christian Eucharist grew out of the Jewish Passover rite. He has attempted throughout his papacy to improve Catholic-Jewish relations by stressing the common Biblical roots of the two faiths.

In taking the cup filled with wine, blessing it and giving it to his disciples, Jesus was re-enacting “part of the Passover rite of the Old Testament” but also proclaiming “the saving mystery of his passion and death,” the pope said.

Repeating the words of the Mass, the pope said that on the night before his death, Jesus said to his disciples, “This is my body, which is given for you.”

“It is with deep emotion that we listen once more to these words spoken here in this Upper Room 2000 years ago,” John Paul said. “Since then they have been repeated, generation after generation, by those who share the priesthood of Christ through the sacrament of Holy Orders.”

“In a sense, Peter and the Apostles, in the person of their successors, have come back to the Upper Room to profess the unchanging faith of the church,” the pontiff said. “For that reason I wish to sign this year’s `Letter to Priests for Holy Thursday’ here in the Upper Room where the one priesthood of Jesus Christ, in which we all share, was instituted.”

Sharpshooters were stationed on the roofs and balconies of the honey-colored stone buildings of the old city as the pope passed in a small, silver-colored sedan. They were part of a security force of 5,000 police deployed in Jerusalem in Israel’s “Operation Old Friend” to protect the pope.

The Cenaculum is situated at the heart of both Old and New Testament history. On the floor below is the tomb of the King David, and encompassing the rooms is a basilica built by the Crusaders and restored by Franciscan monks in the 14th century, which is believed to include the site where Jesus washed the feet of his disciples.

DEA END POLK