A kiss is still a kiss
By JOHN L. ALLEN, JR.
NCR Staff Athens
Papal trips are a kind of theater played on a world stage.
Gestures and symbols and how they are perceived is a high art. Nothing
illustrates the point better than the frenzy surrounding the kiss of local soil
in Athens.
In John Pauls travels, he has traditionally knelt to kiss
the soil as soon as he arrives in a new country. Today, in concession to his
aging joints, a container of soil is usually brought to him.
In Greece, Orthodox leaders, arguing that conservatives would see
the kiss as a claim on Orthodox territory, had pressed the pope to refrain from
his usual ritual. There was some precedent for the request. In 1979, the pope
had kissed a crucifix resting on a pillow rather than the ground in East Timor
to avoid inflaming passions surrounding that islands bid for
independence.
In Greece, the situation became more confused in the hours before
the popes arrival. A local Catholic official told reporters that John
Paul would not kiss the soil, while a Vatican spokesperson insisted he would.
Thus when the popes Air Italia jet rolled into Athens May 4, all eyes
were on the action at the bottom of the stairs.
They didnt see much.
As sometimes happens when the pope is mobbed, the crowd of local
dignitaries on hand crowded in so tightly that few could see what
transpired.
Did he or didnt he do the kiss? Immediately afterwards no
one seemed to know.
Frustrated reporters in the Athens press center awaited the return
of the pool reporters from the airport. Things became truly desperate when the
first ones to get back shouted, What happened? in the hope that the
events had been clearer on the television feed. Some reporters on the scene, in
fact, had called colleagues in Rome who were watching the welcome ceremony
unfold on CNN to find out what they knew -- which, again, was nothing.
Yet because news, like nature, abhors a vacuum, stories had to be
filed. Several agencies decided no smoke meant no fire, and moved accounts
saying the pope had not kissed Greek soil. They spun it as yet another
concession to Orthodox sensibilities. It became the official line on radio and
TV.
Within minutes, however, rumors began circulating that John Paul
had indeed kissed something. Ansa, an Italian wire service, ran a story saying
that the pope had kissed a bowl of Greek soil carried by a nun. The soil, Ansa
said, came from the Greek Orthodox monastery of Timios Stavnos (Holy
Cross), the sort of detail that gave the report an air of authority.
No sooner had this hit the wires, however, than whispers began
that the nun had denied the story. Chaos ensued.
The version of events that eventually gained consensus is this.
Two Greek children and the nun presented a bowl of soil to the pontiff, with
olive branches on top. The pope kissed it. No one knows for sure where the soil
came from, and no one seems to know how the story that it was from a monastery
got started.
In the end, Vatican organizers seemed pleasantly surprised that
pictures of the kiss did not dominate early media reports.
A CNN-era version of the old saw about a tree falling in the
forest thus made the rounds among the press corps: If something takes place on
a papal trip but no one gets video of it, did it really happen?
The apparent answer in Athens was: Not until Joaquín
Navarro-Valls, Vatican spokesman, says it did.
National Catholic Reporter, May 18,
2001
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