My guess is stay in the Vatican until the nukes start flying around in Europe in mid Summer 1997, at which point the Pontiff and other senior members of the church's hierarchy relocate to Switzerland.
iirc Italy was a prime target for the second nuclear exchange in 1998, so it is possible such a relocation could have taken place sometime in 1998 rather than 1997.
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Originally Posted by Snake Eyes
I like the idea of an adventure featuring the Pope as the MacGuffin. Or the actual object. Whatever. Since JP2 was Polish, he might even be a good stand-in for the Black Madonna icon. It would be easy enough to hand-wave that his holiness was touring Silesia at a critical point near the outbreak of hostilities and has been holed up ever since in or around a place like the Jasna Gora with an ever dwindling sized squad of Swiss Guard. It would be kind of like in Jewel of the Nile ... where the "jewel" turns out to be a man and not a gem at all. Or not. Every faction on Earth (or at least in Europe) would have assets on the ground looking for him to either spirit him out of the country to safety, prop him up to unite a fractured Poland or to imprison and maybe silence him completely. The opportunity for conflict and danger would be endless as religious affiliations test national loyalties.
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Years ago someone (sorry, I have no idea who) suggested an adventure scenario set in Poland where the PC's encounter a Roman Catholic Cardinal and a small group of Swiss Guards. They had a couple of trucks and were fanatical about protecting the contents of said trucks. The idea was that John Paul II had sought sanctuary in another country where he had died of natural causes. Prior to his death he had made it known that he wished to be buried in Poland and this group were attempting to fulfill that wish, with one of the trucks containing the Pope's body.