By Philip Pullella
 VATICAN
CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul leaves in fragile health on Friday
for a delicate mission of religious and political peace that will
take him from Orthodox Greece to Muslim Syria and Roman Catholic
Malta.
The May 4-9
trip will again test the faded stamina of the man once called
``God's Athlete'' because his trips left aides and reporters breathless.
The Pope turns 81 this month.
It will be
his first overseas trip of the year and his stop in Syria takes
him to the Middle East for the first time since the region's peace
process began unraveling.
Speaking at
his general audience on Wednesday, the Pope asked Catholics to
pray for the success of the trip, which he said was ``very significant''
to him.
He said he
hoped the stop in Greece would help relations with Orthodox Christians
and that his visit to Syria would help those with the Muslim world.
The official
purpose of the visit, his 93rd outside Italy, is to retrace the
steps of St. Paul, the apostle who converted to Christianity on
the road to Damascus and later preached in Athens and Malta on
his way to Rome, where he was beheaded.
The trip begins
on Friday in Greece, a predominantly Orthodox Christian country
where the Pope and Roman Catholic Church are regarded with indifference,
if not outright hostility.
During his
24-hour stop in Greece, which Vatican (news - web sites) sources
said was kept intentionally short for security and political reasons,
the Pope will enter a religious minefield.
After much
hand-wringing, the Orthodox Church in Greece agreed to go along
with a government invitation for the visit, the first by a pontiff
since the Great Schism of 1054 divided Christianity into Eastern
and Western branches.
In the run-up
to the visit, for which Athens will lay on unprecedented security,
Orthodox militants have called the Pope everything from ``a two-horned
heretic'' to ``a devil in disguise.''
Greece's Catholic
community -- 200,000 people in a country of 11 million -- would
fit tightly into St. Peter's Square and plans to give him a different
welcome at an indoor mass.
Relations
between Orthodox Christians and Catholics -- difficult in the
best of times -- have become severely strained since the fall
of Communism in 1989.
Orthodox communities
in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have accused Catholics,
suppressed under Communism, of using new-found freedoms to poach
believers.
An Appeal
For Middle East Peace
In Syria,
the second country on the tour, the Pope will issue a peace appeal
for the region, perhaps made more pressing by a trembling voice
that underscores his frailty.
He will call
for peace from the Golan Heights city of Quneitra, which Israel
captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War and returned under
a U.S.-negotiated agreement in 1974.
Israeli troops
destroyed Quneitra, but still occupy the western Golan. The Jewish
state's military radar posts perched on the dominating peak serve
as towering reminders, if any were needed, that regional peace
has been elusive.
Syria has
left Quneitra as it was in 1974 and made the city a museum to
illustrate what it calls Zionist destruction.
``The stop
in Quneitra will be highly significant,'' said Vatican spokesman
Joaquin Navarro-Valls.
By visiting
Syria, he will have traveled to Israel and all the border nations
that have been at war with the Jewish state.
Another highlight
of the Pope's visit to Damascus will be a stop in the splendid
Umayyad Mosque, whose history neatly sums up the complexity of
Syrian religious history.
The site began
as a pagan temple, was converted to a church after Christianity
became the Roman Empire's religion in the 4th century and was
made a mosque after the Arabs conquered Damascus in 639.
After four
days in Syria, the Pope ends his trip in predominantly Catholic
Malta, presiding at a beatification ceremony for three Maltese.
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