The memory of Pope John Paul II will be present throughout Pope Benedict XVI's May 25-28 trip to Poland, but the German-born pope's pastoral visit also will focus on his own background.

Pope Benedict will visit Pope John Paul's birthplace and will celebrate Mass in Krakow, where his predecessor was ordained to the priesthood and served as archbishop.

The new pope also will visit Marian shrines dear to the heart of his predecessor and likely will hear pleas to beatify Pope John Paul quickly. At the same time, he will encourage Poles to keep Pope John Paul's memory alive by living the faith as the late pontiff would want them to do.

Pope Benedict approved the theme chosen by the Polish bishops for the visit, "Be Strong in the Faith."

But internationally, the key moment of Pope Benedict's four-day trip will be his May 28 visit to the Nazi's Auschwitz death camp and his prayer service at the nearby site of the Birkenau concentration camp.

Born in Bavaria in 1927, Pope Benedict grew up in Germany during the Nazis' rise to power and witnessed their expanding grip over other peoples and nations, starting with Poland.

While he was a seminarian, school officials enrolled him in the Hitler Youth program, although he soon stopped going to meetings.

He was drafted into the German army in 1943 and served for a year in an anti-aircraft unit that tracked Allied bombardments. At the end of the war he spent time in a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp.

At a May 2005 screening of a movie about the life of Pope John Paul, Pope Benedict said both he and the Polish pope, who was born in 1920, had known "the savagery of the Second World War and the insane violence of men against men, of peoples against peoples."

Pope Benedict also said that only a "providential divine plan" would bring a German to the papacy after a Pole, given the tremendous historical burden of Germany's World War II invasion of Poland and the atrocities committed there.

The Polish and German embassies to the Vatican sponsored a meeting May 15 looking at the implications for their countries of having a German pope succeed a Polish pope.

"This simple fact symbolizes a historic change and reflects the long and difficult, but fruitful, process of reconciliation between Poland and Germany after the painful period of World War II, which began with the German aggression against Poland on Sept. 1, 1939," the embassies' statement said.

Popes John Paul and Benedict, it said, "lived through the atrocities of the war, seeing them from different perspectives. After the war, both were inspired by the same spirit to build a peaceful world based on reciprocal reconciliation in accordance with the teaching of the Gospel."

While much of the media will be focused on the last day's events at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the attention of many Poles will be on the pope's remarks about his Polish predecessor, about Polish society and about the future of the church in Poland.

Pope John Paul and the Polish bishops often expressed concern about declining church practice in Poland with the advent of democracy and liberal capitalism in 1989, but the numbers are still encouraging, Auxiliary Bishop Piotr Libera of Katowice, general secretary of the Polish bishops' conference, told the Italian bishops' news agency.

For example, while Poland has a Catholic population of 36.6 million and the United States has about 67 million Catholics, Poland has more than 6,400 major seminarians compared to about 4,600 major seminarians preparing to serve U.S. dioceses as priests.

According to recently released Vatican statistics, the United States has 9.8 seminarians for every 100 priests, while Poland has 22.5 seminarians for every 100 priests.

---CNS