The Papacy: Wednesday in St. Peter’s

THE PAPACY

Men everywhere—whether they are Roman Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, agnostics, or even Communists—make a common claim on the Catholic Pope: they feel that they have a right to an audience with him. And Popes have always responded, each in his own way. The languid Leo X of the Renaissance grandly received his subjects on horseback while at the hunt, and Pius IX had his own railway car to make whistlestop visits through the papal states. The general audiences of the ascetic Pius XII were like an encounter with a saint. John XXIII’s were folksy—until sickness and duty made him give them up. The mood of Pope Paul’s audiences is somewhere in between, and they draw unprecedented throngs to St. Peter’s every Wednesday morning, sometimes Saturday as well.

Dark Suits & Mantillas. By 8:30 a.m. last Wednesday, tour buses from all over Europe had begun to jockey for parking spaces next to the majestic curve of the Bernini colonnade that guards St. Peter’s Basilica. Cars and taxis began to clog the narrow streets near the Vatican. Out of them stepped bishops, priests, brothers, nuns, seminarians. About half the pilgrims were Italian, many of them attired as for a picnic. But there were plenty of men dressed in their darkest business suits, and women in discreet blacks, lacy mantillas tossed over elaborate coiffures.

Inside St. Peter’s, the nave is still filled with the long rows of seats set up for the Vatican Council (which resumes next week); the papal audience takes place in the transept behind the high altar. Shortly before 10, about 8,000 people clutching audience tickets—pink or blue for most of them, the highly prized white for those with altar-side seats—had squeezed subway-tight around Bernini’s ornate balda-chino, which covers the high altar underneath the basilica dome. “This is worse than the bargain basement at Klein’s,” complained a much-jostled librarian from Schenectady. “This will be the fourth Pope I’ve seen,” boasted a man from Rochester, inching toward a favored spot in the front row.

Like a Pope Should. As St. Peter’s bells clanged out the hour, a cheer started at the door of Santa Marta, gradually filling the church. Surrounded by halberd-bearing Swiss Guards, borne high above the crowd on a portable chair, Pope Paul VI bobbed toward the high altar. He looked small and frail beneath his white robes and heavy red stole; his soft, graceful gestures reminded many of Pius XII. “I was very fond of John, but Paul looks more like a Pope should,” an Italian student said.

Outwardly, Paul seems cold and stern; but audiences detect the humanity inside, and his fluency with languages makes the pilgrims feel at home. He addressed the crowd in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish. Hushed on other days, St. Peter’s is no church of silence when an audience is in session. As the Pope read off the list of the day’s visiting organizations, the great basilica rang with sound—handclapping and whistles, shrill, peeping vivas from nuns and grade-school delegations, deep-toned cheers from seminarians.

There were Italian youth groups from Foggia and Viterbo and Gubbio and Como, a delegation from a Wiesbaden publishing house, some doctors from Canada, and alumni from two gymnasia in Berlin. Pilgrims came from London and Denmark, from Kisslegg and Hackenheim, from Sāo Paulo and Mexico City.

Five times, in five tongues, the Pope delivered the same message. “You came to this audience to see the Pope, to hear his voice and to receive his blessing,” he said. “But you also came to let him see and hear you and to put before him your anxieties, your hopes and your desires. This meeting established a double spiritual current, and so we wish that this circulation of sentiments and spiritual values may be an expression of our unity.”

Personal Greeting. When Paul finished the last translation of his homily, a monsignor whisked the papers away, and the Pope rose to lead the crowd in singing the Nicene Creed in Latin. Then, quickly, he moved down to a chair set below the throne to receive a small group for a personal greeting. An Episcopal priest from Chicago spoke briefly about an ecumenical center to which he belongs. A boy presented the Pope with a soccer ball, neatly wrapped in white paper. Paul courteously rose to assist an Irish woman confined to a wheelchair with a broken ankle.

Shortly before 11, the Pope was borne aloft for the bobbing processional back through the Santa Marta door; outside, he stepped into his car for the brief drive to the Apostolic Palace. As he moved out of sight, blessing his visitors, the basilica echoed to the chant of “Viva il Papa, viva il Papa.” Slowly the crowd drifted away; a few remained to pray and recollect. There had been no great words spoken, nor, for most of the pilgrims, any personal encounter with Roman Catholicism’s ruler; yet nearly all left the basilica awed and exhilarated. “An impressive experience,” said an American surgeon, in Rome for a convention. Asked what she thought of the new Pope, a woman from Northern Italy just glared at her interviewer. “You ask me, a Milanese, what I, as a Milanese, think of a Milanese Pope?”