KRAKOW, Poland (Reuters) - Poland was in a fever of anticipation on Friday as it awaited the emotional homecoming of Pope John Paul, who many fear is making his final, nostalgic visit to his native land.
The 82-year-old Pope lands at 6:15 p.m. for a four-day visit to Krakow, the city which shaped him as a moral leader who inspired Poles to shake off communist oppression.
Largely Roman Catholic Poland has ground to a halt ahead of the Pope's ninth return home to a country now beset by economic woe and unemployment and lacking the optimism that greeted him when he returned in early post-communist days.
Enthusiastic crowds will line the route of the Popemobile from the airport to the Krakow residence where Karol Wojtyla lived as a cardinal before his election as Pope in 1978.
The rousing welcome will buoy the spirits of the Pontiff, who is increasingly worn down by ill-health and old age but who has in the past been revived by his trips to his homeland.
Vatican officials hope Monday's return to Rome will put paid to talk the Pope may retire, rather than die in office, as is the tradition.
Some 4.5 million faithful, more than a tenth of Poland's population, will swell Krakow fivefold during the visit.
"He is so ill that we may not have a chance to see him again," said Tomasz Domin, 34, from northern Poland, taking a walk with his family around Krakow's market square.
"There is great love, goodness and heart in him, and that's what people need today most of all," said his wife Anna.
PAPAL FRAILTY
The Pope, who suffers from Parkinson's disease and arthritis which limits his mobility, is a shadow of the man who last visited Poland three years ago. His hands now tremble openly and he speaks with difficulty, limiting himself to a few words.
In 1999 he had a fall and had to cancel an open-air mass on Krakow's Blonia common due to illness. Over two million are expected to attend a mass in the park on Sunday, which is being staged in part recompense for his absence three years ago.
Poland's President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who despite being a secular former communist has struck up a warm rapport with the Pope, said the homecoming would boost the sagging morale of Poles and reinvigorate the Pontiff.
"I think that after this trip the Pope will leave stronger, not only morally but also physically," said Kwasniewski.
Poles, struggling to complete the transition from communism to democracy begun in 1989, will be looking for words of reassurance from the Pope as they weather record unemployment, rapid social change and seemingly endemic political corruption.
"As a people today, we still need his guidance and need him as a person," commentator Piotr Pacewicz wrote in the Gazeta Wyborcza daily. "We have lost faith in the sense of the changes we are living through."
The trip will take the Pope to shrines he visited as a boy and near a chemical works where he worked during the Nazi occupation while secretly studying theology.
He will go to his parents' grave and take a helicopter flight over his birthplace Wadowice on Monday.
Over 20,000 police, soldiers, emergency and medical workers have been mobilised for the visit, and 140 doctors are on 24-hour stand-by to treat the Pope at two hospitals -- one of which is named after him.