For 89 hours last week, metropolitan New York was the pope’s congregation. The city’s television stations followed his every footstep with pious commentary, leaving the O. J. Simpson verdict to the networks. The pontiff’s outsize image dominated the front page of The New York Times. It was a vivid reminder that multicultural New York City is still a predominantly Catholic town. And everywhere the pope spoke – from the welcoming ceremony by President and Mrs. Clinton at Newark International Airport to the faux cathedral constructed on the Great Lawn of New York’s Central Park – the essential message was the same: Americans, live up to the nation’s highest ideals.
More than on his three previous trips to the United States, John Paul emphasized themes urged on him by the U.S. Catholic bishops. The plight of immigrants topped the list. “Today, as before, the United States is called to be a hospitable society, a welcoming culture,” he said. “If America were to turn in on itself, would this not be the beginning of the end of what constitutes the very essence of ’the American experience’?” He also embraced the bishops’ “seamless garment” ethic, which holds that human life must be protected from conception through old age and is thus opposed to abortion and euthanasia. “When the unborn child – the stranger in the womb – is declared to be beyond the protection of society, not only are America’s deepest traditions radically undermined and endangered, but a moral blight is brought upon society,” he declared.
But John Paul saved his bravura performance for the United Nations. Speaking in English, French, Spanish and Russian, the pope called on the delegates to go beyond their concern for individual human rights and hammer out a charter for “the rights of nations” as well. He recounted his own country’s “nonviolent revolution” in overthrowing Polish communism and urged the same kind of “human solidarity” as the moral lodestar for the United Nations. In a closing flourish, he greeted Arabic and Chinese delegates – in their tongues.
The pope’s vitality now lies mostly in his words. He shambles when he walks. Still, at 75, John Paul embraced crowds with an almost adolescent energy. His messages to Americans, probably his last, had the coherence of hard-won wisdom. Yet his hope for the United Nations – “a reflowering of true humanity in compassion, openness and solidarity between peoples and nations” – is something only young men dare to dream.
