Cover
story 23-year odyssey
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Toronto/Guatemala City/Mexico City
Reporters cover papal trips like the Iowa caucuses, which is to
say through the optic of issues and electoral politics. We focus on what the
pope says, how sharp or controversial his message is,
how many people he draws, and how the crowd responds. As John Paul ages, we
also note how strong or weak he looks, like White House beat reporters toward
the end of the Reagan years.
It took a cold Ukrainian morning to teach me that most of those
who actually turn out to see the pope have a very different agenda.
It was a Sunday in June 2001, and I was trudging across an
airfield outside Lviv, the capital of the Catholic western part of
Ukraine, made unbelievably muddy on this occasion by a torrential rain. A
colleague and I had gone in search of umbrellas, which we hoped to purchase
from a stretch of booths and stalls set up to cater to the some 600,000
pilgrims who had come from all over Eastern and Central Europe for the papal
Mass. The scene was reminiscent of a medieval bazaar, with everything
imaginable for sale -- toilet paper, car stereos, slippers, even small home
appliances.
Everything was on sale, that is, except umbrellas. We did find a
Ukrainian cop who took pity and offered me his poncho, but my ample frame
overtaxed the plastic and it split apart.
After that bit of humiliation, we headed back to the press area,
becoming steadily more drenched. The day was shaping up as a disaster, since
the popes homily contained nothing that would make headlines. We were
wet, miserable and stuck for a lead.
Remembering Grandpa
I plodded forward, lost in thought, when I caught sight of a
30-something woman ahead of me, kneeling alone in the mud. Her gaze was
directed toward the pope, though at that distance he could only have seemed an
indistinct white smudge on the horizon. The womans clothes were soaked,
her hair a mess, her eyes whipped by wind and rain -- and I dont think
Ive ever seen a happier face in my life. She had a smile that could have
powered a midsize city.
Intrigued, I approached and asked if she spoke English. She did, a
bit, and so I put it to her: Why the sunbeam of a grin?
My grandfather was a Catholic priest who was murdered by the
communists, she explained. I am thinking about what he must be
feeling today, seeing the Holy Father on Ukrainian soil.
The Greek Catholics in Ukraine, who are in communion with Rome but
practice Eastern liturgies and traditions, were kicked around as badly as
anyone during the Soviet era. Their church was dissolved and driven
underground, many of their priests were arrested, and some were killed and
tortured in grotesque ways such as being burned in oil and crucified on prison
walls.
My heart is bursting, but I feel only a tiny part of the joy
that fills my grandfather, the woman said.
The story illustrates a point: In evaluating the impact of papal
trips, much depends on what you bring to the table.
This is not to say that papal trips dont sometimes have
political subtext, for good or ill. When John Paul II stood in Victory Square
in Warsaw in June 1979 and told his fellow Poles, Christ cannot be kept
out of the history of man, he knocked over the first domino that would
eventually lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall. When in April 1987 he
administered Communion to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and then appeared
with him on the balcony of La Moneda Palace, some believe he buttressed a
regime blamed for the torture of some 40,000 political opponents and the
disappearance of 4,000.
Yet this sort of political analysis, however valid, does not
exhaust the significance of a papal appearance.
No one with even a passing familiarity with John Pauls
remarkable stamina believes his just-completed journey, an 11-day, three-city
odyssey in Canada, Guatemala and Mexico, will be his last. On Aug. 16 he heads
for four days in Poland, and Vatican spokesperson Joaquín Navarro-Valls
said aboard the papal plane July 23 that John Paul wants to accept an
invitation to visit Manila in January 2003.
Nevertheless, given the popes physical decline, its a
safe bet his travels will become less frequent. Hence this is perhaps a good
moment to take stock, to ask what difference his peripatetic approach to his
office has made.
John Paul II is so routinely referred to in news reports as a
conservative pope that even people who should know better are
sometimes tempted to believe it. His pontificate has certainly had its
conservative aspects, especially on moral questions such as birth control or
divorce. Yet this has also been an innovative papacy in many other ways,
nowhere more so than in how he spends his time. When he left Mexico City Aug. 1
to return to Rome, John Paul had completed his 97th journey outside Italy. By
way of comparison, the pope with the second-highest collection of frequent
flyer miles was Paul VI. His total number of trips? Nine.
A pilgrim-messenger
The old model was that the pope stayed in the Vatican and people
came to him, like an emperor receiving supplicants. John Paul, however, felt
called to be a modern St. Paul, taking his show on the road in a world that had
to be evangelized all over again. In any analysis of his papacy, the trips loom
as one of its most original and important features.
I am a pilgrim-messenger who wants to travel the world to
fulfill the mandate Christ gave to the apostles when he sent them to evangelize
all men and all nations, John Paul II said during a visit to Santiago de
Compostela in Spain in November 1982.
The commitment of time and treasure required by the popes
journeys has always struck some as questionable. The Road Warrior papacy does
not lack critics.
One frequent objection, more a matter of taste than substance, is
to the pop star-style packaging that often surrounds a papal tour. When
Ale Mary beer went on sale in Denver in 1993, or when the
popes picture appeared inside packages of Sabritas potato chips in Mexico
in 1999, many papal loyalists cringed. Should John Paul really be marketed like
a rock group?
If Jesus drove the merchants from the temple, now the pope
appears to associate with them, charged Mexican columnist Raul Trejo
Delarbre in the newspaper Cronica in January 1999.
The high cost of papal mega-events has raised eyebrows over the
years. No one keeps track of the total cost, but given that single stops of 24
hours run into the millions, it seems safe to guess that at least $1 billion
has been spent by the Vatican, local churches, governments and private donors
to fund John Pauls 23-year road show.
When it was revealed that the popes November 1982 trip to
Spain cost $10 million, the auxiliary bishop of Madrid, Alberto Iniesta, wrote
a letter apologizing to Spanish Catholics for its fatuousness and
triumphalism.
Moreover, paying the bills is only one index of the total cost.
Another is opportunity cost -- what might John Paul have done with that 11.21
percent of his time, almost two and a half years of his pontificate, had he not
been on the road? Or, what work might have been accomplished by the best and
brightest of his aides if they had not been hammering out travel logistics in
New Delhi or Sofia or Fátima?
Criticism of papal travel on other grounds bubbles up from both
left and right.
From the left, one sometimes hears that the trips are little more
than exercises in building a cult of personality around the pope, strengthening
his hold on the church at the expense of local bishops. Ive heard some
cynics compare the massive World Youth Day spectacles, for example, to the Nazi
Nuremberg rallies, in that both encourage youth to feel an intense, almost
fanatic personal devotion to a Great Leader. The next pope should travel less,
this line of criticism holds, and focus more on helping local churches solve
their problems.
Im sorry that these visits are all show and
triumphalism without the pope sitting down and talking about the needs of the
people, said Mary Louise Hartman of the Association for the Rights of
Catholics in the Church, at one point in John Pauls 1995 visit to New
Jersey, New York and Baltimore.
A great showman but
Veteran Italian journalist Giancarlo Zizola said that John
Pauls travels have given centralization of authority in the Catholic
church an unprecedented impulse and spectacularization.
From the right, some indict John Paul II for having his heart in
the right place on doctrinal issues but being weak on follow-through. He is
unquestionably orthodox, they say, but he has not done nearly enough to root
out the confusion and malaise from universities, chanceries and seminaries.
Ive heard this view expressed by some inside the Roman curia -- that John
Paul is a great showman but a poor manager. The next pope should travel less,
these folk believe, and govern more.
It is this line of thinking that led Fr. Gianni Baget Bozzo, a
conservative Italian priest with close ties to the right-wing government of
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, to complain that John Pauls travels
promote universality at the price of ambiguity.
During a break at World Youth Day in Toronto, I asked Cardinal
Francis George of Chicago if he feels the omnipresence of the pope reduces the
stature of the bishops -- if as Catholics feel a more direct personal tie to
the pope, their connection with the local bishop suffers.
That sounds like a fundamentalist telling me that if I love
the Blessed Virgin Mary, I cant love Jesus, George said. I
dont know too many bishops who are jealous of the pope.
I put the same question to Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles,
who gave a similar answer.
When the pope was with us for 48 hours in September 1987, we
took him all over -- to African-American communities, to Little Tokyo, to
Chinatown, Mahony said. Some of those places still fly the papal
flag, and lots of people still talk about the visit. It unified us as a local
church, which helps me.
Both cardinals seemed more open to the criticism that by spending
so much time on the road, the pope leaves many of the day-to-day details of
running the church in the hands of the curia.
Its going to be very important for the next pope to
reinforce the pastoral dimension of the church, Mahony said. The
curia must be at the service of local churches, not acting as supervisors or
coordinators of local churches.
As for cost, Mahony acknowledged that the pope does not come
cheap. The bill for his two-day stopover in 1987 was $3.5 million. The
media-savvy Mahony, however, put that figure in context by pointing out that
the visit drew near-constant media coverage. Channel 5 broadcast the entire
visit virtually round the clock. To buy that kind of positive publicity in the
Los Angeles media market, he said, would have broken the bank.
From our experience, the trips are win/win, Mahony
said.
Travel and tourism
Cities around the world dont clamor to host the pope because
they lose money. Denver, for example, said that it got a $100 million bump in
travel and tourism from the $700,000 it spent for the popes 1993 visit.
The New York State Department of Commerce and Economic Development concluded
that a 1995 Mass at Giants Stadium, all by itself, generated $3.4 million in
hotel, concessions and restaurant spending for the city, in exchange for an
outlay of $800,000. St. Louis civic officials say the city made $14 million in
spending by 54,000 out-of-town visitors when the pope stopped for 24 hours in
January 1999. That trips total cost was pegged at $7 million, so the city
doubled its money in one day.
There is also some evidence that papal visits pay off in pastoral
terms.
In 1994, for example, one year after Denvers World Youth
Day, the archdiocese registered 2,000 converts, more than any diocese in the
country. Mass attendance was up 8.05 percent, whereas before it had been
falling. Enrollment in Catholic schools increased 7.72 percent. Over this
period, the total number of Catholics increased only 1.76 percent, so most of
these gains came from pre-existing Catholics more interested in practicing the
faith.
In Ireland, applicants for the priesthood spiked by 20 percent in
1980, one year after a September 1979 papal visit. French Catholic authorities
reported a similar phenomenon after John Pauls August 1997 visit for
World Youth Day.
It must be said, however, that many other nations and dioceses the
pope has visited cannot point to similar concrete gains from the
experience.
The pope often uses the platform afforded him by a visit to
address local concerns, though how successful these interventions are is a
matter of perspective.
In March 1983, for example, during a 12-hour stop in Nicaragua, he
asked Catholics to take direction from their bishops rather than the
Sandanistas. But halfway into his homily, shouts began. They quickly went from
the ecclesiastical to the political: We want a church that stands with
the poor! We want peace! Between Christianity and the
revolution there is no contradiction! And finally: Power to the
people! An angry John Paul three times yelled back:
Silencio! Some observers say the divisions thrown into
relief at that Mass have still not closed.
Another attempt to heal local wounds came in Canada, when the pope
spoke on the sex abuse scandals. He said the harm done to children fills
Catholics with sorrow and shame, but that the vast
majority of priests and religious who desire only to serve and do
good must not be forgotten.
George said that while its a debatable question
whether the fruits produced by papal travel justify the cost, he suspects it
does. Anyway, he said, its not really his opinion that matters.
Go and ask the people, he suggested.
Thats usually the answer defenders of papal travel give,
because they know its a winning one. While First World critics may focus
on issues of cost and image, those who turn out by the hundreds of thousands in
every corner of the globe seem to evaluate the event by other criteria.
Magnet for humanity
John Paul is a magnet for humanity. His best turnouts rank among
the largest crowds ever assembled. They include:
- Manila, January 1995, 4.5 to 5 million for World Youth Day.
- Mexico, January 1979, 10 million lined the 75-mile route from
Mexico City to Puebla.
- Mexico City, Aug. 1, 2002, some 6 million at the Basilica of
Our Lady of Guadalupe and along the popes 12-mile route to the
nuncios residence in conjunction with the canonization of Juan
Diego.
The only other events that come close, according to ABC News
research, are the Hindu Kumbh Mela festival of January 2001, when 10 million
people bathed in the Ganges River over 24 hours, and the funeral of Ayatollah
Khomeni in June 1989 that drew 3 to 10 million. Cumulatively, more people have
turned out to see John Paul II than any other figure in history.
The devotion the pope inspires is remarkable. When we lifted off
from Mexico City Aug. 1, millions of people flashed mirrors toward the sky to
say goodbye, so that the city literally sparkled. From the papal plane, it was
a magnificent sight.
Most analysts believe that John Paul has made travel part of the
job description for the papacy, so his successor will also hit the road. The
next pope may travel less, however, and he may travel differently.
Mahony said that the next pope may stage fewer mega-events and
spend more time listening to local Catholics, learning about their situation
and helping them to identify solutions to problems. In that sense, the next
pope may travel less like a pop star and more like the superior of a religious
order.
Yet John Pauls high-octane traveling circus sometimes
surprises even its organizers by its fruits. Lifelong Protestant and beer
magnate Peter Coors, for example, converted to Catholicism after the
popes 1993 visit to Denver for World Youth Day. (It should be noted that
his wife was Catholic and they were raising their children in the faith.)
Another example? I covered John Pauls Sept. 23 Mass in
Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, which was attended almost entirely by
Muslims and Orthodox, since the Catholic population of that Central Asian
republic is negligible. I was struck by how enthusiastic the young Muslims
seemed, so I grabbed an interpreter and started asking questions. Bear in mind
that this was 12 days after Sept. 11.
Interreligious harmony
Isnt it strange for a Muslim to be at a religious
ceremony led by the pope? I asked. Granted, Kazakhi Muslims tend to be
rather laid-back, but such interreligious harmony just 200 miles from the home
of the Taliban and Al Qaeda was still rather striking.
Oh no, several young Muslims told me. The pope
visited us at the mosque in Damascus, so it is OK for us to be here. We are
returning his gesture.
The reference was to John Pauls May 5 visit to the Grand
Mosque of Omayyaid in Damascus, which I also witnessed. That event drew wide
coverage across the Muslim world, helping ease tensions with Western
Christianity.
I have interviewed American kids at World Youth Days in both Rome
and Toronto. Ive spoken to Orthodox Christians in Athens on the Acropolis
as they awaited the pope, Muslims in Damascus, Greek Catholics in Ukraine,
old-style Soviet atheists in Azerbaijan, and rowdy Latin American Catholics in
Guatemala and Mexico. Cumulatively Ive spoken with hundreds of people at
papal Masses, and almost to a person they were enthusiastic, even
rapturous.
George said there is theological value to the exposure the pope
draws when he moves around the world.
John Paul is making visible the primary emphasis of the
Second Vatican Council [1962-65], which was the church in the world, not the
church in the church, he said. John XXIII called the council
because he wanted the church to be the sacrament of the unity of the human race
in a new moment in history. He didnt call the council to change the
church, but the world.
Under the impact of globalization, George said this mission of
promoting global unity is especially urgent. God chose the right moment
to give us a globe-trotting pope, he said.
Hence the ultimate question: Is it working? Is the world more
unified because John Paul has circled it more than 30 times?
In the end, this too may be a matter of perspective.
When I was with the pope in Kazakhstan, I was assigned a young
Kazakhi Muslim woman as an interpreter. Also on our press bus was her best
friend, a Kazakhi Russian who is Orthodox Christian. As the days went by we got
to know one another, and the two young women told me of their dream of opening
a school for disabled children in Astana. They had seen one during a visit to
the United States, and wanted to bring something similar to their own
country.
Kazakhstan is known for interreligious harmony. When the first
waves of Orthodox Christians arrived here under Stalin, they did so in chains,
and were often saved from starvation by Muslims. Those historical memories
produce a sense of common purpose, and hence the kind of friendships Galiya and
Nora share are common.
I asked the two, however, if in the post-Sept. 11 context they
were worried this might change, as Islamic conservatism makes gains in their
part of the world.
We are frightened, Galiya told me. But the pope
is here, and you can see that we Muslims love him, too. This gives us hope that
we can find a way to live together.
Perhaps its a naive or overly optimistic assessment. But if
the popes visit helped these two marvelous young women feel better about
their friendship and their future, maybe it was worth the price of a plane
ticket.
John L. Allen Jr. is NCR Rome correspondent. His e-mail
address is jallen@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, August 16,
2002
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