The joyous, enduring faithful: no burden too great for those awaiting pope

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 20, 1995 by Patricia Lefevere

NEW YORK - It was 3 a.m. Oct. 7. Wake-up calls alerted television crews in several rooms of the Sheraton New York Hotel in midtown Manhattan. A bus would be leaving soon to take them and their gear to Central Park.

Upstate in Buffalo at 3 a.m. Auxiliary Bishop Edward M. Grosz and a group of pilgrims were already boarding a chartered plane to get them to Central Park by dawn's early light.

On Staten Island, buses began to congregate just after 3 a.m. at St. Charles Church. Madeline Karpinski Dalton, 75, rose at 2 a.m. so as not to miss her bus. She wasn't upset that it didn't leave until 5 a.m. "What a joy, what a blessing, what a grace-filled day!" she exclaimed.

She huddled with others on a damp bench near the park's 50-acre Great Lawn just after sunrise. But there was no sun. Only drizzle and yesterday's mud puddles. "Mass in the mist?" someone suggests with a yawn and a shiver.

"The apostles didn't have it easy," she chuckled, wrapping another layer of laughter around those listening. "This lady is 88," she said, pointing at a standing shivering figure; "she's been here since 5 o'clock."

And so it went at nearly every venue visited by Pope John Paul II during his brief tour of Newark, N.J., New York and Baltimore. At each site the faithful gathered, often after hours of travel to arrive hours before the main event to wait even more. They waited in the mist and rain, in the occasional downpour and under sunny skies.

Far from the neatly choreographed proceedings at the main altar, the pilgrims chatted. Often the everyday details of family life tumbled out, the way it does among strangers become friends simply by being in unusual circumstances together, the kind of talk that might happen even in New York when the subway train is caught in a long delay.

Straining toward sublime

At times the talk turned to the visitor who, really, was the host the gathering, and then the conversation would strain toward the sublime. Then the deep connections that were peculiarly spiritual and Catholic would bubble up. And then it would become clear that this was something quite different from the normal fare at Central Park or the daily racing crowds at the Aqueduct or the sports contests and rock concerts at Giants Stadium.

Far from the crisp lines of center stage, where ranks of clerics sat decked in all their hierarchical splendor, was the church in all its gregarious variety. Rough-edged and pious, rebellious and acquiescent, old, young, rich, poor, bearing every manner of accent and color. Among the pilgrims, there were differences aplenty with this pontiff over all the "red button" issues. But those differences, which might have tripped up and snagged the pilgrims were, more often, picked up and carried along. They simply would not get in the way these days.

And so they gathered to be with what for most was a dot of a pope on a horizon over a sea of humanity. This stooped, aged figure, speaking in halting English to a culture that worships youth and is increasingly suspicious of the outsider, speaking words that any Madison Avenue advertising executive would lay a stiff bet no one would come to hear, defied all the odds in a string of events that seemed, at times, as mysterious as the faith itself.

In the early morning damp at Central Park, Dalton talks about her daughter, Lynn Ann, a Sister of Charity of Mother Seton who teaches at St. Dorothy's Academy in the Bronx and of a second teaching daughter, Mary Frances Quinn. "She's no relation to Edel Quinn of the Legion of Mary."

Madeline believes that Quinn, Dorothy Day and former New York Cardinal Terence Cooke should all be canonized. "We're surrounded by all these saints, all this goodness, right here in New York," she offers, gesturing toward a long queue of pilgrims now filing to their seats. "Why is there all this evil?"

Her son, Howard, is pastor at St. Francis Church, "that's the poor one," in Newburgh, N.Y., but couldn't come, because of weekend duty. Another son, Terrence, works for the IRS - "like Matthew the tax collector," she said, chuckling again.

At 8 a.m. Roberta Flack lights up the park with "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," her smile bright under a black velvet hat.

The media pope

Then the crowd catch the face - the man on the Jumbo-Tron everyone's come to see. Outdoor cathedral, skyscraperringed arena, Pope John Paul II is "the man with a message who's come to deliver it in the media capital of the world," said Fr. John Catoir of The Christophers in an earlier TV interview. "And he knows how to use the media," Catoir added.

Landing at Newark Airport Oct. 4, the pope told Americans - in the presence of President Clinton and several White House and Cabinet chiefs - to welcome the immigrant and care for the poor and needy. Not exactly the gospel according to Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, who two days later request but don't get a meeting with the pontiff.

Although Baltimore Cardinal William Keeler would not confirm that it was Gingrich and Dole who had made the requests, he noted that the pope's schedule was too tight and that anyone who really wanted to see him had known "for months" the dates of his five-day visit.