rushed to a Rome hospital with the flu and breathing problems, the Vatican said. As news emerged of his latest health problems, Catholics in his native Poland and around the world ran to their local parishes to pray for the men who led their Church for nearly 27 years.
He is also the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI more than four centuries ago.
In Poland, prayers were held at churches in Warsaw and Krakow, where Karol Wojtyla decided to become a priest and where he was ordained in 1946.
"I woke up this morning and heard the Pope is ill. I started to pray immediately and then I decided to come here and pray for him," Krystyna Malica, 70, told a Reuters news agency reported outside her church in the southern Polish city.
There were also prayers at the St Mary’s Church in his hometown of Wadowice, where the young Karol Wojtyla was christened, news reports said. Catholics also lit candles for his health on the Catholic holiday of Candlemas Day.
NO DRAMA
However Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former Polish president Lech Walesa seemed to reflect views from Vatican officials when he urged the world’s one billion Catholics not to over-dramatize Pope John Paul II’s hospitalization, but to "pray for our health and his."
"The pope is made of solid stock," Walesa, who has met the pope on several occasions, told Polish and Western media.
"Let’s not turn the pope’s hospitalization into a tragedy. Let us pray for our health and, above all, the pope’s, and everything will work out for the best," he said. "Many had said the Pope was in bad shape and they are already with St Peter, while the Holy Father continues to serve people and the world."
Earlier, Vatican Spokesman Joaquim Navarro-Valls told journalists outside the hospital there was "no reason for alarm." He said the pontiff "has a slight fever and his general condition is good." Navarro-Valls added that the Pope’s respiratory, heart and metabolic parameters were "within normal limits", but that he had to stay "a few more days" in hospital. He was breathing easier since doctors had cleared his congested airways, Vatican officials said.
HOSPITAL MASS
The pontiff even celebrated mass from his hospital bed in the 10th-floor suite reserved for him at Rome’s Gemelli Catholic teaching hospital, which some doctors have reportedly dubbed "The Second Vatican" as he was treated here eight times.
A benign tumor was removed from his colon in 1992, and he spent a month in that hospital after falling over in the bath and breaking his leg in 1994. Despite his poor health, the pontiff has a busy agenda, with regular public appearances and private audiences.
Pope John Paul II continued to work from hospital Wednesday, February 2, naming two bishops in Brazil and an auxiliary bishop in Croatia, the Vatican said in a statement. He appointed Luis Vicente Bernetti and Leonardo Ulrich Steiner, to replace the resigning bishops of Apucarana and Sao Felix in Brazil, the Bloomberg news agency reported.
FOREIGN VISITS
The pontiff also plans to continue his foreign visits, with a trip to Cologne, Germany,
being planned for next August to mark the Catholic World Youth Day celebrations, news reports said. But just before Christmas, he apparently admitted to senior Church prelates that "the passage of years has made ever more clear to me the need for God’s help and the help of man".
A 1981 assassination attempt is believed to have caused many of the health problems that have left him frail for much of the past decade, forcing him to reduce his travels and use a wheelchair.
(With the BosNewsLife News Center, news reports, Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent)
