Pope Prays for Patience in a War-Weary Angola : Africa visit: John Paul tries to soothe a nation, still reeling from years of struggle, now racked by a vicious crime wave.

LUANDA, Angola — Visiting Pope John Paul II brought a message of patience and brotherhood Friday to a war-torn nation where the cruel irony of a tenuous peace has been lawlessness.

Angola is enduring a savage crime wave as epitaph to a 17-year civil war that claimed more than 300,000 lives.

Aid workers and diplomats say that 15 white residents have been murdered around Luanda in recent weeks and that banditry by former soldiers is increasingly widespread in the countryside.

Like the foreign businessmen newly returned to the city, Luanda residents are loath to go out at night.

With central authority weak and police protection deficient, the crime is a disturbing counterpoint to cooperation for reconstruction by longtime enemies, the kind of cooperation that the Pope has repeatedly praised.

Lurching toward elections, both sides in the civil war now seek to create international confidence in Angola and to jump-start an economy ravaged by their war.

To underline the “prayer for justice and peace” that is the leitmotif of his visit, the Pope celebrated Mass on Friday at an abandoned soccer field that was a wartime execution ground in the provincial town of Huambo.

“From the four corners of the country we hear a cry that is at once an appeal of reconciliation and hope: Never again war! Peace for Angola! Peace for Angola always!” the Pope exhorted in his homily.

On the second day of a weeklong Africa visit, John Paul prayed that “the painful period of destruction remain forever behind us.”

A cease-fire in the war between government and guerrilla forces that battled as Cold War proxies for the Soviet Union and the United States is a year old. It lies uneasily across a nation of 10 million where scarcely anything works except leftover mines littering abandoned fields and empty country roads.

“Overcome the temptation to prolong the armed conflict, the source of ruin and useless suffering. Begin now the time of national reconstruction and peace,” the Pope urged.

Soon after his arrival Thursday, John Paul posed for pictures standing between President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, a former Marxist whose Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) had the backing of the Soviet Union and Cuba, and former guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, whose National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) was supported by the United States and South Africa.

The war ended in a stalemate after communism collapsed, Cuban troops went home and foreign principals seemed to lose interest.

Now, in the run-up to U.N.-supervised elections in September, a peace-seeking Angola is bedeviled by a plethora of young men with guns and no jobs.

As many as 200,000 soldiers of the two armies are among 1.4 million displaced Angolans being fed by the United Nations.

Luanda, the dilapidated capital of 1.5 million, survived the war in exhaustion and decay but under tight MPLA control that included a nightly curfew.

Now, residents say, crime is skyrocketing, including car thefts, assaults and murder.