Pope John Paul II is in the Azerbaijan capital Baku where he is beginning a five-day long visit to Azerbaijan and Bulgaria, the 96th foreign tour of his pontificate. The Pope, who turned 82 on Saturday, looked frail ahead of the demanding five-day trip, raising speculation of an early retirement.
A priest read most of his birthday speech Saturday, and at a mass in Rome on Sunday he asked for prayers to continue his mission. Last week two cardinals said they believed he would step down if he felt he no longer had the strength to fulfil his duties.
Both Azerbaijan and Bulgaria have tiny Catholic communities, with just 120 registered Catholics in Azerbaijan. The Vatican does not even maintain a diplomatic mission there, forcing the pope to stay in a hotel for the first time in all the foreign visits of his pontificate.
Vatican officials from neighboring Georgia, another ex- Soviet state that the Pope visited recently, have selected the modest 13-room Hotel Irshad for the distinction, to the obvious delight of its general director, Vugar Mirzoyev.
"When the people came from the Vatican we didn't quite understand they'd want him to stay here," he said earlier this week. "We were very surprised."
The pope's host in Azerbaijan, 79-year old President Heydar Aliyev, could hardly have a more different background from that of his visitor.
While John Paul was practicing his faith in the troubled circumstances of communist Poland, then doing his best as pope to undermine east European communism, Aliyev was rising through the ranks of the avowedly anti-religious communist system.
Aliyev was a full member of the Soviet Union's ruling politburo and for many years headed Azerbaijan's KGB, or secret police.
Despite the apparent irony of his hosting the leader of the world's Roman Catholics, Aliyev, who is also not in the best of health, described his visit as a historic occasion.
The pope has become a regular visitor to the former Soviet Union, notching up his seventh ex-Soviet state last September when he went to Kazakhstan. But his most cherished dream, a visit to Russia, is apparently out of the question.
Relations between the Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches remain strained. Russian Patriarch Alexiy II said last week there was a lot of evidence that Catholic priests were engaged in missionary work to convert Orthodox believers.
In Bulgaria, a close ally of the old Soviet Union, where he travels Thursday, there are only 80,000 or so - roughly one per cent of the population of eight million.