Pope Back Home After Stopover in Seychelles

ROME — Pope John Paul II arrived home Monday, wrapping up a two-week, 30,000-mile tour after a stopover in Seychelles, where he celebrated Mass and prescribed marriage as the remedy for social instability.

John Paul’s remarks during a torrential downpour on a five-hour stopover in Seychelles--an Indian Ocean archipelago off the African coast--concentrated on one of the island nation’s most serious problems, an illegitimacy rate estimated at more than 70%.

“A society crumbles when marriages become fewer and fewer and more unstable, when a person’s first concern is to satisfy his or her own selfishness or to seek easy pleasures, when infidelity and the breakup of marriages become acceptable,” John Paul said in Victoria, the islands’ capital.

Waiting in the Rain

Thousands waited in the rain as the Pope’s Qantas Airways jumbo jet touched down at the international airport on Mahe Island, six miles outside Victoria.

The papal motorcade made its way through the downpour to the soccer stadium.

The rain collapsed part of the plywood roof over the altar moments before the pontiff arrived for Mass. Church officials scrambled to rescue the chalice and the unconsecrated hosts.

There were no injuries. The service proceeded and the rains subsided briefly.

After a private meeting with President Albert Rene, John Paul boarded his papal jet for Rome, looking fresh despite the grueling tour that also took him to the vast South Pacific-Indian Ocean region.

The pontiff arrived at Ciampino Airport in Rome shortly before midnight.

“I should be very tired, but it seems to me that I’m not,” John Paul said as he made his way through the back of the plane during his customary farewell to reporters who traveled with him.