Pope John Paul II starts his first official papal visits outside Italy to The Bahamas, Dominican Republic, and Mexico.

Pope John Paul II was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 16 October 1978 until his death in 2005. He was the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI in the 16th century, as well as the third-longest-serving pope in history, after Pius IX and St. Peter.

During his reign, Pope John Paul II made 146 pastoral visits within Italy and 104 foreign trips, more than all previous popes combined. In total he logged more than 1,167,000 km (725,000 mi). He consistently attracted large crowds on his travels, some among the largest ever assembled. While some of his trips were to places that were previously visited by Paul VI, many others were to countries that no pope had previously visited.

The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is an island country located within the Lucayan Archipelago. It contains 97 per cent of the archipelago's land area and 88 per cent of its population. It comprises more than 3,000 islands, cays and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, located north of Cuba and north-west of the island of Hispaniola and the Turks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the U.S. state of Florida and east of the Florida Keys. The capital and largest city is Nassau on the island of New Providence. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force describes the Bahamas' territory as encompassing 470,000 km² (180,000 sq mi) of ocean space.

The Dominican Republic is a country in the Caribbean located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles of the Caribbean Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean. It shares a maritime border with Puerto Rico to the east and a land border with Haiti to the west, occupying the eastern five-eighths of Hispaniola which, along with Saint Martin, is one of only two islands in the Caribbean shared by two sovereign states. In the Antilles, the country is the second-largest nation by area after Cuba at 48,671 square kilometers (18,792 sq mi) and second-largest by population after Haiti with approximately 11.4 million people in 2024, of whom 3.6 million reside in the metropolitan area of Santo Domingo, the capital city.