KIEV, Ukraine - Pope John Paul arrived in Ukraine, the cradle of Slavic Orthodoxy, on Saturday for a five-day visit which has sparked bitter protest from many of the former Soviet republic's Orthodox faithful.
As the Pontiff's plane touched down at Kiev's Boryspil airport, hundreds of Orthodox priests, nuns and worshippers prayed to try to keep the head of the Roman Catholic Church away from their sacred sites.
Too frail now to kneel, the 81-year old Pontiff kissed a bowl of Ukrainian soil held by two schoolchildren before shaking the hand of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and receiving full military honours and a gun salute.
The Polish-born Pope is expected to use the visit, his 94th outside Italy, to focus on Christian unity and to address disputes between Ukraine's six million Catholics and many Orthodox believers who accuse him of stealing converts and land.
Authorities estimate more than two million people will flock to masses in the capital Kiev, where Prince Volodymyr in the year 988 laid the foundations for the Russian Orthodox Church, and the western city of Lviv, the heart of Catholicism in Ukraine.
Security is tight and police are braced for demonstrations.
On Saturday evening, the Pope will meet Kuchma and leading cultural figures.
POPE TO CELEBRATE HUGE MASSES
On Sunday and Monday, the Pope will preside over two huge open-air masses at Kiev's Chaika airfield. He is also expected to pay his respects to the estimated 100,000 Jews massacred by Nazi troops at Babi Yar ravine near Kiev during World War Two.
The Pope then travels over 500 km (300 miles) to Lviv for two days of services and meetings with Catholic leaders.
Ukraine will be the fifth former Soviet country the Pope has visited, but the trip will be more delicate than visits to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 1993 and Georgia in 1999.
Religious tensions have eased in those countries but are rife in Ukraine, where Western and Eastern Christianity mix and clash despite their observing almost identical rites.
Much of the modern-day dispute revolves around land. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin suppressed the Greek Catholic Church and handed over its property, including churches, to the local Orthodox Church, which was run from Moscow.
Catholic believers were either driven underground, into exile outside the former Soviet Union, or transported to Siberia.
The Pope plans during the visit to beatify 27 Soviet-era martyrs. It is the first beatification in Ukraine -- the penultimate step towards being proclaimed a saint -- for the Greek Catholics since 1867.
Those to be beatified include Yakym Senkivsky, a priest who the Church says was boiled to death in a cauldron after being arrested by Communist authorities in 1941 in western Ukraine.