Krakow, Poland — Pope Benedict XVI, on a trip to Poland to honor his predecessor, acknowledged Friday night one fervent wish in this deeply Catholic nation: that its favorite son, Pope John Paul II, be made a saint.
After a long day in which Pope Benedict greeted huge crowds at two sites central to Pope John Paul's life, he appeared on the balcony of the residence of the archbishop of Krakow, the post that John Paul held before he was elected pope in 1978. He noted the prayers of Poles for John Paul's "elevation to the honors of the altars."
"This prayer supports those working on his cause, and enriches your hearts with every grace," he said, speaking in Italian.
In his year in office, Benedict has shown no sign of elevating John Paul, who died in April 2005, to sainthood with the same rapidity with which his predecessor proclaimed other Catholic heroes saints.
But his words added to the assumption that it is likely to happen. On his visit, Benedict has worked to bolster ties between the Vatican and Poland, a devout country expected to take an ever-larger role in a Europe drifting further from religion.
He began the day presiding over an outdoor Mass in central Warsaw, where in 1979 the new Polish pope had uttered words that are now counted as one early wound in the demise of Communism.
Benedict was greeted by an estimated 300,000 people on Pilsudski Square in the heart of the capital. In that very square the year after he became pope, John Paul delivered a homily in which he embedded in a prayer a veiled call for the end to Communism. "Let your spirit descend, and renew the face of earth," John Paul had said. He paused, then improvised a coda: "The face of this land," meaning, unmistakably, Poland.
On Friday, in the shadow of shiny new buildings that have renewed the face of Warsaw, Benedict recalled those "significant words" and spurred Poles to a new struggle against secularism.
"I ask you now, cultivate this rich heritage of faith transmitted to you by earlier generations, the heritage of the thought and the service of that great Pole who was Pope John Paul II," he said. "Hand it down to your children; bear witness to the grace that you have experienced so abundantly."
But Benedict, a former professor, did so in his characteristic style — as a lesson delivered without flourish, drifting occasionally into the academic — without the grand words and gestures John Paul used against a more immediate enemy in tenser times.
"We must not yield to the temptation of relativism or of a subjective interpretation of sacred scripture," he said.
But his comparative lack of fervor, noted obliquely in newspapers, did not keep Poles away. Thousands slept on the square in Warsaw, and the crowds remained thick even though rain poured down as the pope spoke. Perhaps inevitably, though, the feelings were not as high as for John Paul.
"He is good, but he is not my pope," Isabel Niedzielska, 45, said as her tears poured out with the rain and the recollection of John Paul.
For Slawek Nalescz, 35, a sociologist, there was no point in comparing the two men. John Paul, he said, would always be special to Poles. Benedict, a German elected last April at the age of 78, "is the head of the church, and that's the reason to pray for him, to respect him, to love him even." On Saturday the pope will visit John Paul's hometown of Wadowice, then on Sunday, the final day of his trip, he will visit Auschwitz and Birkenau, the Nazi death camps.