Pope Benedict XVI will visit Poland, the homeland of his predecessor John Paul II, from May 25-28, the Vatican announced Saturday.

The trip, Benedict’s second foreign visit as pope, will conclude 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.

New Pope

Benedict, who succeeded the Polish pope on the latter’s death a year ago, made his first foreign trip to his native Germany in August 2005, including a visit to the synagogue in Cologne.

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 died in the camp in southern Poland in World War II, at the hands of Poland’s Nazi German occupiers.

Most of them 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 has made it a priority of his pontificate to engender closer
relationship with Judaism.

Catholic radio warned

Meanwhile, Benedict has 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.

Leading lights in the government, including Prime Minister Kazimierz
Marcinkiewicz have made guest appearances on the station since coming to power last year, which has led to accusations by Jewish figures that their appearances lent credibility to the station.

Late last month, Radio Maryja commentator Stanislaw Michalkiewicz said that "Jews have humiliated Poland internationally by demanding money" for goods and property expropriated during World War II.

"We look after democratic issues in Ukraine and Belarus, while in our own backyard, ’kikes’ sneak up behind us to try to oblige our government to pay them money on the pretext of these demands," he said.

The European Jewish Congress Thursday slammed Radio Maryja as an
"established outlet for spreading hate against Jews" and urged the Polish government to prosecute the broadcaster.nstability since legislative elections last September.

Marcinkiewicz’s conservative Catholic Law and Justice party
has been unable to form a durable coalition commanding a parliamentary majority.

However, the party has claimed state institutions need to be "purged" of former communists and liberals who governed Poland after the end of communism in 1989 to be held to account for their alleged misdeeds.