VATICAN CITY - The Cold War may have ended politically in 1989 but in religious terms it is alive and kicking in Ukraine, where Pope John Paul arrives on Saturday.
The 81-year-old Pope's five-day trip to Ukraine will force him to tiptoe through a religious and political minefield that will test his powers of persuasion and reconciliation.
Ukraine will be the fifth country of the former Soviet Union the Pope will visit but the trip will be more delicate than visits to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 1993 and Georgia in 1999.
While religious tensions in those countries have eased somewhat in the past dozen years, they are still rife in Ukraine, where Western and Eastern Christianity mix, clash, and sometimes explode.
In 1946, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin suppressed the Eastern Rite Catholic Church, known as the Greek-Catholic Church, and gave its property, including churches, to the local Orthodox Church, which was run from Moscow and was pro-government.
The Eastern Rite Catholics worship in a Byzantine rite used in the east since the Great Schism of 1054. But they owe their allegiance to the Vatican.
For five dark decades they were forced to worship underground or pass themselves off as Russian Orthodox faithful.
The lid came off when Mikhail Gorbachev declared freedom of religion in the Soviet bloc and the ban was lifted in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ownership disputes have sometimes pitted elderly believers against one another. Property disputes also broke out in the 1990s between followers of the local branch of the Russian Orthodox Church and two rival Orthodox traditions.
Now the Pope of Rome, born in bordering Poland, is to visit Ukraine for the first time in his 94th trip outside Italy.
HAILED BY SOME, HATED BY OTHERS
He will be hailed by some as a liberating hero who influenced the collapse of communism and hated by others who see Catholics as a Trojan Horse of a religious army bent on poaching Orthodox souls.
The Catholic side denies this, saying they have merely reclaimed what was taken away from them in the first place when nearly half a century of Stalinist repression began.
"This is not a man who's coming with an army and is going to force mass conversions on the Orthdox," said Father Ken Nowakowski, spokesman for Ukrainian Catholic Churches.
Still, in a land where the religion you belong to often is intertwined with your political persuasion -- pro-Russia or pro-West -- the Pope will have his work cut out for him.
While some see the differences as irreconcilable, Cardinal Lubymyar Husar, head of the Greek-Catholic Church, says Ukrainians can be a mediating force since history has put each of their feet in different religious and political camps.
"This mix of Byzantine and Latin cultures has greatly influenced us and our way of being Christian," said Husar.
"In the West there is a great ignorance of the East and in the East there is an even greater ignorance of the West," he told reporters in Rome last month.
"Because we are at the crossroads of these two cultures we want to help both sides understand each other. Ignorance breeds fear. If there were better understanding of each other there certainly would be less fear," he said.
A PATRIARCHAL "NYET" FROM MOSCOW
The Ukraine trip again will bring the Pope geographically close to Moscow, which, along with China, is one of the last places the ageing and ailing pontiff dreams to be able to visit.
Ukrainian Orthodox loyal to the Moscow patriarchate have held several protests in Kiev against the Pope's visit.
Russia's Orthodox Church has opposed it, demanding the Vatican make amends for what it says is the seizure of Orthodox churches in western Ukraine and the poaching of its congregations.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexiy II backed out of a planned meeting with John Paul in 1997 and has refused further invitations until those conditions are met.
Alexiy reacted coolly in May when the Pope made a plea for forgiveness for 1,000 years of sins committed by Roman Catholics against Orthodox Christians.