I first met John Paul II in 1987. It was in the summer, and it was by accident. I was passing through Rome on the way home to the U.S. from Hong Kong, and the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Frank Shakespeare, kindly included me in an audience at Castel Gandolfo with a congressional delegation led by Rep. Charles Rangel (D, NY).
I remember nothing of the pope's talk, except that it seemed to make even Congressman Rangel look humbled. Not an outright miracle perhaps, but certainly not within the realm of the ordinary. What I do remember is the pope himself: how small he was, almost petite. It was all the more striking because this compactness was combined with a definite solidity and vigor, much like a Korean boxer.
Almost ten years later I would meet the pope again. This time it was as part of a Vatican conference on family and economics sponsored by the Cardinal Lopez Trujillo and featuring Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker. For most of the delegates the papal audience was the highlight of the week. In my case it was the more extraordinary because I was there en famille. In addition to my wife, my father, mother, sister, father-law, mother-in law, and three brothers-in-law were also with me. They had come to Rome to attend the baptism of my daughter, whom we were adopting from China and planning to have baptized in St. Peter's because of the fortuitous dates of the conference. As it turned out, we would not be permitted to go in and get our little girl for another two months. But our families came anyway because they had bought their tickets, and the Pontifical Council for the Family being what it is, it simply squeezed them all onto the list.
To the non-Catholics present, of whom there were many, it must have made an odd spectacle. To a Catholic, however, there is an inescapable feeling of déjà-vu, even for those who, like everyone in my family save me, had never been to Rome before. We start past the Swiss guards at the foot of the Scala Regia, up the long, gradual staircase that takes us past the Bernini statue of Constantine visible from inside the portico of St. Peter's. It seemed strangely familiar, like visiting an ancestral home in the old country. Presently we are inside the papal apartments, where we shed our overcoats and scarves and are seated in the audience room.
The pope enters, and we all stand. Then we sit and listen to his words, generally nostrums on preserving the work of the family. But I am shocked by what I see. This pope has seen many triumphs during his pontificate, even in worldly terms: the collapse of the USSR and the liberation of his homeland; the success of his pastoral visits all around the world, including America; the forcing of the United Nations to back down on its population control efforts at Cairo. Yet it was a weary old man who peered out at us from his chair.
In the columns of newsprint devoted to the pope, the adjective of choice is “frail,” but John Paul II's features are too rugged, his jaw too determined, for frail. “Pained” would be better, because it hints at the inner torments imposed by such responsibility. I thought of the tiny corridor and painted arches around the confessione of St. Peter, and the guide's reminder that we would see it all again, on television, when John Paul died and his body was taken this way to its resting place. I thought too of the simple sarcophagus of his predecessor, John Paul I, and the Spartan tomb of Paul VI, who suffered so much but gave us Humanae Vitae. For popes, death must be a relief.
Soon my thoughts were interrupted by a tap on the shoulder; it was our turn. As we went up, my wife held out the tiny photo of our daughter-to-be, the only link between us then. “God bless the baby,” said John Paul, who then blessed us. A platitude the effect of which is impossible to communicate once divorced from the insistent force and grace of the pope who spoke it. We turned to leave, my wife in tears. In the event John Paul chatted to the various delegates in our native tongues, no mean feat in that there were Americans, Europeans and South Americans in our group.
He spent a little more time with Gary Becker and his wife. And a second thought struck me. This is not the pope you see in the newspapers: urbane, thoughtful, suffering. The pope you see there is a pinched old man who is against sex. As the Washington Post recently put it, “for many [Catholics] the pope also speaks with the voice of a conservative crank when he stonewalls on abortion, married priests, women priests.” The press, you see, favors sex in all its many manifestations, as expressions of personal liberation with no limits. And it rightly recognizes as an enemy a pope who has tagged this disposition as part of the “the culture of death.”
For those outside the Fourth Estate the objections to the pope in the American media might be thought to be an objection to absolute authority, especially among those schooled in a Protestant American tradition of individualism. But anyone with any experience of newsroom editors has long experience of absolute authority. The same New York Times editors who are aghast when John Paul condemns abortion or urges Catholics to remain faithful to their church's teaching, these same editors can be found exhorting their readers to support this or that bill, to oppose this new piece of legislation or chuck some unfavored politician out of office. And it is all done with a faith, very striking in light of their shrinking readerships and influence, in the power of the Times imprimatur. Romalocuta est, causa finita est.
For these, the most maddening thing about John Paul is that he doesn't appear to care what the New York Times thinks of him, a great source of liberation. This presents the newsroom with an awful pickle. On the one hand, the preferred way of dealing with the pope is to treat him as a slightly ridiculous figure tied to an outdated institution. The pope is out of step with the age, hence the constant assertions showing this or that many Catholics disagree with this or that doctrine (“Vatican Out of Step on Birth Control, GroupFinds,” ran the headline in the Washington Post after Catholics for a Free Choice issued the results of one poll). And clearly it is the view that sooner or later the pope will come around to their side. Talk about touching faith.
The difficulty with this approach is that despite the pope's retrogressive message (it never occurs to my colleagues that it might be because of it), John Paul has demonstrated that he is not at all irrelevant. Certainly Mikhail Gorbachev didn't think so, when he came hat in hand to Rome to make peace. Nor did Al Gore, who had intended to go to Rome to sign onto a worldwide right to abortion but was forced to back down quickly solely because of John Paul's one-man efforts against it. Even the Chinese don't think he's irrelevant: though Catholics account for but a fraction of a percentage of China's 1.2 billion people, the politburo is afraid to let him visit. There is something about legitimacy that shines through, and it is especially feared by people who know they don't have it. As my father-in-law, a non-Catholic, puts it, “You've finally got a pope who knows how to pope.”
The fallback position, of course, is that the pope is important, but only because millions of people are mired in superstition. This came out during the pope's 1995 visit to Manila, where some four million Filipinos came out to see John Paul say Mass, lining the route from the airport all the way down to the Manila Hotel. Four million people. Afterward I searched for some comparable gathering of people in history — especially a peaceful gathering — and I couldn't find it, not Woodstock, not the March on Washington, not the Nurenburg rallies. But why do I suspect that if four hundred lesbians had shown up, Mr. Koppel would have had their spokesman on Nightline?
In Catholic circles this is all taken as evidence of anti-Catholicism.
There is that, to be sure, but the problem is more fundamental: most newsmen of this generation have no religious sense at all. By this I do not mean that they are atheists or wicked people. Rather, I mean it in a literal sense: they have not the least understanding of what religion, Christianity in particular, means to those who adhere to it, much less what it has meant to history. In a country where, according to a recent Gallop Poll, 95% of people believe in God and where on any given Sunday there are more people attending church services than all sporting events combined, it means that the American people are alien to those reporting on them. Indeed, according to a survey by Robert Lichter, only half of journalists believe in God, 86% seldom or never attend religious services and only 54% of them disagreed with the statement “adultery is wrong.”
Yet it would be wrong to think them cynical. Truly Chesterton was right when men stop believing in God it's not that they believe in nothing. They believe in anything. It is hard to take seriously people who believe the pope has nothing to say about the human soul but somehow find space for Barbra Streisand when she talks about the homeless.
In a room with John Paul II, the newsroom and its deadlines seem far away. Indeed, in my week in Rome I indulged in a favorite treat of mine, which is not to watch or read any news. Most American newsrooms have CNN running all the time, often with the sound off, lest anyone miss anything. Over the years, however, I have come to think of news as a sort of steady pipeline of the ethereal to which I might tap in or out with absolutely no consequence. For our pursuit of the ethereal dulls us to the important in life, and it is a distinct pleasure to return to work and find that I have completely missed the latest budget impasse in Washington or the latest missile dropped on someone in the Middle East by someone else. The news ye shall always have with you. In one place I worked, there was a story that went around about a copy editor who once uttered aloud, “I can never remember our style on this. Is it I-r-a-q or I-r-a-n?” There were shudders up and down the spines of his bosses as they wondered how many stories on that part of the world this man had touched. They needn't have worried. Apparently no reader ever noticed.
After pausing for a group photo with us later printed in L'Osservatore Romano, John Paul gave a final wave and then left through a side door. I thought of the seeming contradictions of this pope: a man beholden to transmit a message 2,000 years old but willing to use all the tools of the present — television, personal appearances, the internet — to propagate it. And it reminded me of a comment Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger of Paris once made to me, warning against the mistake of “confusing a modern man with an American liberal. They are not the same thing.” I know. I met the one in Rome. And I work with the other every day.
© Copyright 2003 Catholic Exchange
William McGurn is a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street
Journal and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Formerly the Washington bureau chief for National Review, McGurn’s articles have been published in a variety of periodicals including Newsweek, Esquire, The Spectator (of London), The Sunday Telegraph, The National Catholic Register, The Washington Post, and others.
