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Cover
story
Papal
visit sparks memories
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER NCR
Staff St. Louis
Fall 1979. Pope John Paul II was
making a historic first visit to the United States. Historic was
the operative word in articles about the event, as author Garry Wills pointed
out in his acerbic critique of the way American journalists venerated the
visitor from Rome in a carnival of excess and make-believe.
Even the most hard-nosed news professionals seemed incapable of a
shred of objectivity, let alone analysis or historical context, Wills wrote in
a 1980 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. His article remains as
one of the most endearing and enduring souvenirs of that papal event.
Miracles abounded. Crowds surged. The pope glowed. And the
press swooned, Wills wrote. Instead of reporting the papal visit,
journalists celebrated it like a pack of acolytes.
Guilty as charged. Recently hired as a reporter for the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, I joined the celebratory chorus in a feature story
scribbled in longhand in the back seat of a homeward-bound car and phoned in to
an editor at 3 a.m. The article chronicled a pilgrimage by a caravan of St.
Louis families, including ours, to Des Moines. The pope, elected almost exactly
one year before, said Mass on an Iowa farm following his tour of the Eastern
seaboard.
Our six families, dutifully Catholic, included 16 kids. The
Schaeffer five ranged in age from 16 to 8. That year the families making the
journey had few reservations about this pope. Some still do. A nun, a dear
friend given to mirth, boundless energy and wise words to help me balance
family and career, had provided a musical theme for our trip: Were
off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Rome. She said the words
had been running through her head. Most of us were in our 30s, filled with
spiritual energy from Marriage Encounter weekends and Vatican II-inspired love
for the church. We were accompanied in presence and in singing by a young
priest dubbed Father Guitar.
As the popes 1999 visit to St. Louis approached, I
interviewed many of the people from that caravan. A few were going to see the
pope again. Most were not. Some who were children in 79 have since joined
other Christian churches. Several former pilgrims had been dissuaded by what
the Post-Dispatch later labeled a Chicken Little atmosphere,
marked by repeated pre-visit warnings of huge crowds and possibly extreme cold.
(It turned out to be sunny and spring-like in St. Louis on Jan. 26 and 27,
making local heroes out of the so-called Pink Sisters, a contemplative group
that had prayed for weeks for such a favor.)
It would be fine if they would send somebody to pick us
up, said Ron Sczepanski, a devoted Catholic whose travels of the past few
years have taken him and his wife, Audrey, to every continent except
Antarctica. They painted a very bleak picture.
Just a few intrepid souls from our caravan had resolved to close
the loop between John Pauls first U.S. trip and what would surely be his
last. They included Evan Schaeffer, the eldest of our offspring. In October of
1979 he was 16. Now 35, with three children of his own, he had agreed to
accompany his firstborn, 9-year-old Lydia, to the papal Mass at St. Louis
indoor football stadium, the Trans World Dome.
It struck me as a powerful sign of just how long Pope John Paul II
has been pope. It also struck me as a powerful symbol of the faith being
passed.
We decided to go together, Evan, Lydia and I, along with Sarah
Bernard, 34, our now-married second-born. Going as an extended family to the
St. Louis Mass posed obstacles, as tickets were distributed by lottery and by
parish. But we had worked it out.
* * *
What had moved Sarah most in 1979, what had moved most of the
children then, according to their current memories, was the bigness of it
all.
I remember the whole friendship thing, said Elizabeth
Grace, who was 9-year-old Elizabeth Nedwek at the time. Ellen Schaeffer, our
youngest, then 8, recalled it being kind of like Woodstock ... touchy
feely and warm, though cold and rainy, she said. I remember the
spirit.
Over dinner recently in St. Louis, Barb Beckermann --
eighth-grader Barbara Perry in 1979 -- recalled the long walk in the dark to
the Mass site that year. Then it started getting light, she said.
I saw all of these people walking in the same direction, and I realized I
was part of something really big.
Renewal of that communal spirit in her own hometown was what Sarah
was anticipating in early January. Before the pope arrived she had a dream.
I was talking on my cell phone from the papal Mass to a woman who was
saying shed decided not to go this time, but she might go next year.
But you dont understand, Sarah told her in the dream.
This is never going to happen again. Its a
once-in-a-lifetime event.
The hours spent waiting for the popes arrival at the stadium
were a chance to reflect, with no small amount of grandmotherly affection, that
Lydia is rich in blessings. Her treasury includes brains, an enterprising
spirit, wholesome good looks, a devoted extended family and the hard-driving
lawyer and writer father who had brought her to the papal Mass.
Evan shared with me his youthful recollections of the trip to Des
Moines, carefully recorded in his journal. I guess the Mass was all
right, he wrote. We were pretty far away, so mostly all I could do
was listen. It is something you remember all your life though. He also
recalled, when pressed, being amused when a whole bunch of bishops,
not to mention the pope, emerged from a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter.
Today he was giving Lydia a chance to bank memories of her own.
Collaborating in adventure, father and daughter had groaned over, then brushed
aside pre-visit warnings of an endurance test. After all, endurance had also
been needed in Des Moines. Not only was there the eight-hour drive both ways,
there were hours of waiting in a wet chill. We fended off rain with large green
garbage bags being sold by a local entrepreneur and worn like long gowns by the
grateful multitudes.
In St. Louis, rather than sprawling on a hillside, we had premium
indoor seats. By parking at Sarahs workplace and hiking across downtown,
we avoided boarding buses in the middle of the night, as most Mass-goers had
been persuaded to do. Logistics were so complex, parking predicted to be so
scarce and security so tight in St. Louis for the two days of the popes
visit that the citys schools and many large businesses closed.
* * *
Lydia is nobodys fool. Last year, with the age-appropriate
world-weariness of an 8-year-old, she responded impatiently to my query about
her religion classes. Distraught that administrators had insisted she enroll
with second-graders rather than with her third-grade peers (because she
hadnt made her first Communion), she rolled her eyes and sighed.
Were just learning all about God and grace,
Nana, she said with a shrug suggesting that she had moved beyond such
trivialities. Stuff I already know.
What Evan hoped to impart to Lydia by taking her to the papal Mass
was a sense of the churchs dimensions. Its about more than
the size of the event, he said. I want her to experience the
oneness that cuts across the social and political divides of neighborhood, race
and nation, to see 100,000 Catholics rise in unison to greet the
pope, and to hear them profess together their common creed.
The Mass was orchestral, a mix of dignity and jubilation. The time
seemed much shorter, Lydia proclaimed afterward, than the seven hours wed
spent.
To pass time before the Mass began, while thousands outside passed
through security checks, Lydia asked about sights on the stadium floor.
Fascinated by groups of nuns in habits, she evoked a brief lesson about vows,
about charisms, about rituals mostly abandoned. Hearing that the nuns who
taught her grandfather had to shave their heads, she abandoned her usual
savoir-faire. For real? she asked, wide-eyed.
We talked about who would occupy the special chairs around the
altar. Almost surely, I said, those covered in white were for the cardinals.
After a few minutes I thought to explain that cardinals were a special class of
bishops who get to elect the pope. Oh, she said, with a sense of
the synonymous that had escaped me. I thought you meant the cardinals
like Mark McGwire. We shared a laugh together, making memories.
* * *
The pope that Lydia saw was much changed from 1979. He had been
vigorous then, suggesting to many a new vitality for the church. He is stooped
from age and illness now, walking slowly, speaking with a slur.
Some things, though, just dont change. The St. Louis
mainstream media joined in the general hysteria over 1999 papal events,
reporting, as the press had in 1979, as if John Paul II represented the hopes
of every Catholic, as if Garry Wills had never written a word. It was left
mostly to the alternative press, the Riverfront Times, to air critical
views. Some 500 dissenters who gathered on cathedral steps the evening before
the popes arrival, protesting womens exclusion from church roles,
got only 6 inches of Post-Dispatch news space amid thousands celebrating
John Pauls arrival.
Were making a Santa Claus out of him, one
disgruntled Post-Dispatch reporter said in conversation.
Wheres the analysis of his impact on the church?
I think were mistaking the pope for the Lord
himself, grumbled another.
To some, it was a mistake easy to forgive. I look at him
like Jesus, said Florence Cameron, 81, in a pre-visit interview. She had
joined our pilgrimage in 1979.
Sue Perry, Camerons daughter, was more subdued.
Im still proud of the faith, she said. Whatever disagreements
she or members of her family might have with the pope, he calls us to a
higher ideal. I dont lose sight of that. Perry, a hospital
chaplain, and her husband, Bob Perry, a court reporter, were among the few from
the 1979 event who were planning in mid-January to attend another papal
Mass.
Sue and Bobs daughter Barb Beckermann, with siblings Peggy
Clodius and Jim Perry nodding in agreement, said, It was those things we
did together that make us a family and a good family. I think the faith has
made us the family that we are.
I think hes fascinating, added 27-year-old Jim,
who planned to see the pope in one of his parades through St. Louis. The
title, the history, -- I stand in awe of it all.
It did seem that, as in 1979, an awful lot of people love John
Paul II. His rock star-like reception at a youth rally in St. Louis was
unbelievable, except to those who have seen it before. If young people are
longing for heroes, many clearly have found one in him. As Andrew Greeley
pointed out in a recent commentary, the fact that most U.S. Catholics
dont follow church teaching doesnt mean they dont love the
pope. In Mexico, in St. Louis, this papal trip has been, like so many, a
lovefest.
In the late 1970s, when the church was still alive for me, I
really thought the laity would be proclaiming their faith from the pulpit by
now, said Denis Hartley, who, with his wife, Penny, took some of his six
kids to see the pope in 79. But Hartley doesnt blame the pope for
the lassitude he, along with some of his children, now feels. Hes
just saying what the church has been saying all along, Hartley said.
Others, though, blame the popes conservatism for their
frustrations. Louise Bullock, who is preparing for a certificate in spiritual
direction, admires the popes social teachings but doesnt feel
as much a part of mainstream Catholicism as she did in 1979, in part
because of his views on women. During this papal visit she planned to
participate only in the womens vigil at the cathedral. Back then I
was more into rules and structures, she said. Now my faith means
more to me than my church.
* * *
To borrow an analogy from the pope, reported as saying that he is
in the sunset of life, the adults on that 1979 journey were in the optimistic
early afternoon, a time when faith burned hotter. If questions sometimes
tormented, some things seemed more certain, resolution to doubt closer at hand.
Like the rag-peddler in the film Lies My Father Told Me, we
didnt necessarily believe in miracles but we relied on them.
The intervening years have left some of us more sober, less glibly
assured that all things work out for the best.
Father Guitar, the glue for our pilgrimage, left the priesthood to
marry, symbol of an exodus that would deprive the church of many of its most
able leaders. Incarnate Word Sr. Patricia Kelley, the ebullient nun who gave us
the wizard theme, was raped and murdered eight years later in the office where
she spent long hours on behalf of the citys poor. Three years earlier, at
47, she had been honored with the St. Louis Globe-Democrats annual
Humanitarian Award, the first woman to be selected by the citys now
defunct morning newspaper, following 25 men.
Jerry Lee Little, 32, a man in and out of prisons since he was 15,
confessed to killing Kelley and three other women while on parole from a
Missouri prison. He will spend the rest of his life in prison. Missouri juries
of late, though, hew less often to the popes admonition at Mass in St.
Louis: Human life must never be taken away, even in the case of one who
has done a great evil.
On the 1979 trip, we celebrated Mass in our hotel room -- an
intimate affair that Molly Ioannou, another of the Schaeffer clan, remembers
above all because it felt like the early church. Some of us read
from a book by Jane Howard called Families. I reported a few lines from
that book in my article for the Post-Dispatch.
I shall try to make you understand, Howard wrote,
imagining how she would address her unborn children, that certain
mysteries were meant to remain mysterious, that hellos imply farewells ... that
it is well to speak plainly, and on occasion to raise your voice in
song.
Twenty years later, those lines have taken on new meaning. During
Sr. Kelleys funeral Mass at St. Louis Cathedral, where the pope would go
on Jan. 27 to lead an interfaith service, the Communion hymn was one of her
favorites: Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord. The words stuck
in my throat.
Though spared tragedies in our immediate families -- most of the
children who went on that 1979 pilgrimage are, by various standards, thriving
today -- the parents have moved into the bittersweet late afternoon of their
lives. On the best of days, light plays on a shadowed landscape. We no longer
search so hard for answers. We are more tolerant of mystery. We have learned
that speaking plainly, however laudable, doesnt always get the reaction
that we want.
If I raise my voice in music, it is unlikely now to herald a
wonderful wizard in Rome, less rarely to be Feelin
Groovy, another song we sang that year. Though generally more content,
more willing to let mysteries remain mysterious, I am paradoxically more
inclined to darker themes, like the words of the traditional American hymn that
concluded Sr. Pat Kelleys funeral Mass in 1987. These were words that,
even then, I could gratefully sing:
My life flows on in endless song, above earths
lamentations. I hear the real though far off hymn that hails a new
creation. Above the tumult and the strife, I hear its music ringing.
It sounds an echo in my soul; how can I keep from singing?
* * *
As Jane Howard had noted, hellos imply farewells. Bidding farewell
to Pope John Paul II at the end of his St. Louis trip brought a surge of mixed
emotions.
Yes, I often long for a more progressive church, for parishes
filled with the spirit of hope that this pope, ironically, both inspires and
chills. I long for the reputations of loyal theologians to be restored, for the
end of acrimonious disputes over the future of American Catholic universities,
for inclusive language in the liturgy.
Yet history is likely to remember the globetrotting Pope John Paul
II more for his summons to economic and social justice and his political
achievements than for his rigidity or the pronouncements about sexual morality
that have fallen on resistant ears. As Robin Wright pointed out in an article
in the July 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the former Karol Wojtyla
has helped to reshape the world. A man who learned from the Nazi era, when he
was part of the underground church in Poland, to speak in code to Catholics
oppressed by communism, he is widely credited with speeding the demise of the
Soviet bloc. Wrights article was titled What Would the World Be
Like Without Him? -- words actually spoken by a Lithuanian leader.
Evan noted that the enthusiastic ovations that greeted John Paul
in St. Louis far surpassed the warmth of his welcome in 1979. I guess
this is a recognition of his achievements, he said, as he and Lydia
joined in the applause.
I can still hear Pope John Paul II denouncing capitalism in
Edmonton, Canada, on Sept. 17, 1985. Midtrip, exhausted by the combined
stresses of the popes schedule and my papers deadlines, I had
overslept. I turned on the television set midmorning to hear him angrily
denouncing the injustice of the global disparity of wealth. Shaking his fist,
he spoke of a final judgment in which the poor South shall
judge this rich North.
It remains to be seen whether the young people in America who
cheer so enthusiastically for the pope will respond to his preaching against
capitalisms global excesses, reiterated on his pre-St. Louis Mexican
visit. Will that message carry more impact than his much-ignored conservative
stance on sexual morality? Will his social teachings affect the future as his
political activism has affected the recent past?
These are accomplishments and questions that Lydia and others of
her generation will link to this man only when they are old enough to read
deeply in history, to know that God and grace are paradoxically far more
complicated, yet just as simple, as they seem to her today.
Before the Mass in St. Louis, Sarah, Lydia and I visited the
concessions. I bought Lydia a rosary. Although I rarely pray the rosary myself,
I thought it was the most enduring of the available souvenirs. Lets
get it, I said, overcoming her hesitancy. It will be blessed at a
papal Mass, You will show it to your children and your grandchildren when you
tell them about this event.
It was a gesture Sr. Patricia Kelley, a thoroughly progressive
nun, would have approved.
The responsorial psalm at the Mass, Taste and See the
Goodness of the Lord, harked back to her funeral Mass. This time the
words did not stick in my throat. As the family goes, so goes the
nation, the pope would say in his homily. Sitting beside Lydia, beside
two adults, our offspring, who continue to care about the faith, how could I
not join in?
National Catholic Reporter, February 5,
1999
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