VATICAN CITY: Pope Benedict XVI will visit Poland, the homeland of his predecessor Jon Paul II, from May 25-28, the Vatican announced on Saturday.
The trip, Benedict's second foreign visit as pope, will conclude on May 28 with a visit by the German pontiff to the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.
He will also visit Krakow, where John Paul II spent the first decades of his priesthood.
The trip will begin in the capital Warsaw, but Benedict will also go to the shrine to the Virgin Mary at Czestochowa, and Wadowice, the late pope's home town.
Benedict, who succeeded the Polish pope on the latter's death a year ago, made his first foreign visit to his native Germany in August 2005.
A delegate from the Vatican, Alberto Gasbarri, visited the notorious death camp at Auschwitz earlier this year to help prepare for the papal visit.
At least 1.1 million men, women and children perished in the camp in southern Poland in World War II, at the hands of Poland's Nazi German occupiers.
Most were European Jews exterminated in the purpose-built gas chambers of the most grimly efficient of the Nazi death camps. They were among the six million people who perished during the Nazis' chilling "Final Solution".
Benedict recently warned a Polish fundamentalist Catholic broadcaster, which has been slammed by Jewish leaders as anti-Semitic, not to meddle in politics.
His concerns were expressed in a letter by the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk, to Radio Maryja, a media empire that has been built up on Catholic fundamentalist, nationalist, anti-liberal and often anti-Semitic ideologies.
