`666' DATE PUTS FEAR OF EVIL IN COLOMBIANS.

Byline: Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

In a bizarre outbreak of national anxiety, throngs of Colombians braced Thursday for the birth of the anti-Christ.

They held prayer vigils. They towed their children to Catholic churches for baptism. They crowded Masses. And they beseeched priests to bless them with holy water.

The dread stemmed from the date: June 6, 1996. Taking from a biblical passage that mentions 666 as ``the number of the beast,'' many poor Colombians believed that Thursday would be a day of evil.

Others struggled to keep the faith.

``I believe in God and I don't think anything will happen. But I'm here as a matter of prevention,'' said Gloria Retabisque, pulling her 2-year-old daughter, Danna Carolina, into the El Carmen Church. ``I'm going to throw holy water on her.''

The Catholic Church tried to squelch the spreading conviction, but to little avail. By Wednesday night, churches in working-class southern Bogota overflowed with parents clamoring for their children to be baptized.

``We calculate there were 500 people here seeking baptisms (in the past two days),'' said the Rev. Hernando Gomez, parish priest at the San Isidro church.

Fretting about the anti-Christ also spread to Peru and Ecuador, although on a far lesser scale than among Colombia's 35 million people, 95 percent of whom identify themselves as Catholic.

``This phenomenon could be seen coming because we are getting close to the next millennium,'' the Rev. Antonio Arregui, head of the Ecuadorean Bishops Conference, told reporters earlier in the week.

By early morning, lottery vendors sold out of all tickets with the numbers 666 - or 999, the number associated with the forces of good.