KIM LAWTON: From the beginning, Pope John Paul II has called this Middle East visit his special jubilee-year pilgrimage, a search, he says, for the footprints of God in the sacred places of salvation history.Cardinal WILLIAM KEELER (Archdiocese of Baltimore): Here in the Holy Land, what happened long ago seems to come alive. When you pause in quiet prayer, visualize what took place in the spot, it can reach into your heart and penetrate the spirit much better than trying to imagine it from a distance.
LAWTON: The pope began his sacred journey in Jordan on Mt. Nebo, where the Bible says Moses stood and looked out at the Promised Land. John Paul called the spot a symbol of hope that God keeps his promises. He also went to the Jordan River. Christians mark this as the place where Jesus was baptized. According to the Bible, it's also the place where the prophet Elijah was taken to heaven in a fiery chariot at the end of his life.
John Paul crossed the Jordan by airplane and arrived in what he called the blessed land of Israel. Here, he retraced the life and ministry of Jesus, who Christians believe was God in human form.
Reverend JEROME MURPHY-O'CONNOR (Professor of New Testament, Ecole Biblique): If you focus on the divine, then the human gets buried. But it's here where people can walk where Jesus walked, where they can make the same sort of observations on which he based his parables. Then that means a renewed sense of Jesus as a human person, and then they begin to see the divine as filtered through the human, and they begin to see Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life.
LAWTON: The pope's itinerary included prayers in Bethlehem at the Grotto of the Nativity, where tradition says Jesus was born. It also included a youth mass on the Mount of Beatitudes, where Jesus preached one of his most famous sermons, the Sermon on the Mount, in which he said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God."
In coming as a pilgrim, John Paul is part of a long tradition that stretches back to the earliest days of Christianity, when believers began paying special reverence to the earthly places of divine importance.
Rev. MURPHY-O'CONNOR: It's really a desire for contact with God, because pilgrimage means to go to pray at a place in the hope of, you see, that prayer will be easier or that there will be some sort of tangible contact with holiness or with the divine.
LAWTON: Pilgrims from all over the world followed the pope to Israel this week, seeking that contact with the divine.
Unidentified Woman #1: At the spiritual level, I've gotten closer to God.
I've got -- received greater faith, much hope and joy.
Unidentified Woman #2: To think it's 2,000 years ago, and we're here, seems so awesome. It really is just awesome.
Unidentified Woman #3: A dream come true for me to walk the same path that our Lord walked 2,000 years ago. That is just really great.
LAWTON: The earliest surviving description of a Holy Land pilgrimage is from the fourth century. A French Christian from Bordeaux talks about coming here to the Pools of Bethesda in Jerusalem, where the Bible says Jesus healed the lame. Since then, millions of Christian pilgrims have come to the Holy Land. Their coming has had dramatic implications for the political landscape here.
Mr. LORENZO CREMANESI (Author): There was always a direct connection between pilgrimage and politics in this area of the world. The holy places where often it protects for any different kind of power to be here, to be present.
LAWTON: Both sides took the pope's visit as recognition of their claims. Political and religious tensions were also provoked by the pope's travel on the Jewish Sabbath, which forced security officials and others to work. In Israel, ultra-Orthodox Jews take the Sabbath very seriously, mandating that all work of any kind stop the minute sundown begins.
