Pope pilgrimage enters final day

The pope ends his Middle East pilgrimage in Malta

VALLETTA, Malta -- Pope John Paul II is to beatify three revered Maltese Catholics at an open-air mass on the final day of his historic pilgrimage.

Wednesday's service will be the culmination of the pontiff's ground-breaking three-country tour which has taken him in the footsteps of Saint Paul.

The pope arrived in Malta on Tuesday on the last leg of a six-day journey across the Mediterranean.

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The pontiff's two-day visit to the Roman Catholic Church's oldest bastion of faith in Europe, and the only country in Europe where divorce is illegal, is his second in 11 years.

A predominantly Catholic country, despite 200 years of Arab occupation, Malta fell under Christian influence after St Paul's ship carrying him to Rome as a prisoner was shipwrecked on its rocky eastern coast in AD 60.

The account of the shipwreck is given in the Acts of the Apostles, making Malta one of the very few countries to be mentioned specifically in the Bible.

The open-air beatification ceremony is for two Maltese priests and a nun who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Maltese priest George Preca, one of the three, is known locally as "Dun Gorg."

He founded a society for the promotion of Christianity, the Society of Christian Doctrine, in 1907, which prepares children for Holy Communion.

Also being beatified are Benedictine nun Maria Adeodata Pisani, the daughter of a Maltese baron, and Ignatius Falzon, who graduated with a degree in theology but would not be ordained a priest.

Falzon is best known for teaching catechism among British servicemen at a time when Malta was annexed to the British Crown.

The pope is in Malta after landmark visits to Greece, where he asked for forgiveness for 1,000 years of Catholic sins against the Orthodox, and Syria, where he became the first pontiff to enter a mosque in Islam's 1,400-year history.

But in Syria he left behind an international controversy over President Bashar Assad's comments made regarding Israel during the pope's visit.

Syria was "astonished" by critical comments made by U.S. officials on Assad's speech, according to a statement carried by the official Arab Syrian News Agency on Tuesday.

It said officials told U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker that comments made by his government were "based on a misinterpretation and ignorance of the details of what was said" during Pope John Paul II's visit.

Greeting the pope Saturday, the president put the blame for Israeli-Palestinian violence on Israel.

He then went a step further to mix politics and religion, saying Jews "tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad."

The State Department criticised those comments on Monday, accusing Assad of inflaming religious passions and hatred.

U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that Assad's remarks "are as regrettable as they are unacceptable" and he endorsed the pope's call for reconciliation.

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