c. 2004 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ With the help of a mini-elevator and a throne on wheels, an ailing Pope John Paul II will lead the world’s more than 1 billion Catholics in celebrating the 27th Christmas of his long reign.

Although the 84-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff has eliminated a number of Christmas traditions in order to conserve his strength, and his role has become less active, he will remain at the center of the season’s most important ceremonies.

Increasingly debilitated by arthritis and Parkinson’s disease, John Paul will nevertheless preside over a midnight Christmas Eve Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, deliver his “orbi et urbi” message to the city of Rome and the world at noon on Christmas Day and offer Christmas greetings in some 60 languages.

Both the Mass and the message will be televised throughout most of the world.

On New Year’s Eve, the pope will return to St. Peter’s Basilica to preside over Vespers and offer a “Te Deum” prayer of thanksgiving for the year that is ending. He has already prepared his message for Jan. 1, when the church will mark its 38th annual World Day of Peace.

In the message, which the Vatican issued Thursday (Dec. 16), the pope condemned poverty in Africa, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, terrorism and the war in Iraq, and called on all men and women of goodwill to “overcome evil with good.”

Between Christmas morning and New Year’s Eve, the pope is expected to remain in his apartment in the Apostolic Palace this year rather than making the effort to drive to his hilltop country residence at Castelgandolfo, 25 miles south of Rome, as he has done in the past.

The Polish nuns who keep house for him will prepare his Christmas lunch, which he will probably share with his secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, who is a fellow Pole, and possibly with a handful of other close friends.

It was John Paul who in 1982 introduced the Vatican to the northern custom of celebrating the season with a Christmas tree as well as the traditional creche showing the Nativity scene.

This year an army helicopter flew a 110-year-old fir from the mountains of Trentino in northeastern Italy, where the pope went skiing 20 years ago, to St. Peter’s Square and placed it beside the creche, which will be unveiled Christmas Eve.

The pope was not present at the twilight tree-lighting on Wednesday (Dec. 15), but as a sign that he was watching the ceremony, a candle was lit in the window of his darkened study overlooking the square.

Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop emeritus of Detroit, now governor of the Vatican city-state, stood in for John Paul. He said the 105-foot tree was “the tallest we have had in all these years” and that by surviving wind and storm for so many years, it reflected the tenacity of the faith of the people of Trentino.

John Paul, once so physically strong that he was known as “God’s Athlete,” rarely walks now. He presides over the Mass rather than taking the more active role of celebrant, and he often reads only part of his homilies.

At public ceremonies, the pope is confined to a throne on wheels and sometimes uses a mini-elevator to reach the altar without standing.

His weakness is primarily due to Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative neurological condition. There is no sign that the disease has affected the pope’s mind, but year by year his aides have lightened his schedule.

The pope several years ago gave up celebrating Christmas morning Mass in St. Peter’s Square, and he no longer drives to a Jesuit church in the center of Rome to celebrate a full-scale New Year’s Eve Mass. So far, however, he has been able to read his “urbi et orbi” message and deliver his multilingual Christmas greetings himself.

How much travel his health will allow in 2005 is in question. Archbishop Renato Boccardo, who organizes papal trips, said Wednesday that the only trip that is certain for 2005 is to Cologne, Germany, Aug. 18-21 for World Youth Day celebrations.

A visit to his native Poland, his 10th since becoming pope, is also possible, but if he makes other trips they will probably be brief ones within Europe. This year his only trips outside Italy were overnight visits to the Swiss capital of Bern and the shrine of Lourdes in southwest France.

MO/PH END RNS