The five or six days the Pope spent in Ireland in 1979 were a mad whirl for him and an even more hectic one for the international press corps trying to keep up. As happened in Mexico and was to be the hallmark of all the many tours of his pontificate, the trip was a non-stop succession of speeches, masses and visits to sacred sites. He had the advantage of a helicopter when needed to avoid the endless traffic jams caused by the vast throngs of people and the extreme narrowness of most of the rural roads off the main motorways. For example, after the youth mass celebrated in the open at Galway Bay, the buses carrying the journalists were stuck in car-choked country lanes for hours afterwards.
I realized more harshly than ever before that, as I had experienced with missionary work up north, a lot of journalism consists of “hurry up, then wait and wait.” But eventually the stories got filed. Then it was time to catch a few hours’ sleep before getting up and tearing off in the papal wake again. When the Irish trip finished, the Star’s photographer and I were chosen in the draw for a seat on the Air Italia 747 that was to carry the Pope across the Atlantic to Boston for the American lap. Overall that was a big disappointment. We had been told he would be coming down from first class to meet with us during the flight. I was certain that, after so many addresses, so much talk in Ireland, he would do what any other world figure would do and at some point hold a press conference. Mid-Atlantic seemed as good a time and place as any. I felt we would have an opportunity at least for a few questions.
It was not to be. When it was announced over the plane’s PA system that he was on his way to our encounter, there was a frantic rush of cameramen and reporters towards the front of the aircraft. There was a lot of shoving and pushing to be in the front ranks. I somehow managed to be struck on the back of the head by the tripod of an over-eager Italian TV correspondent in the process. Suddenly the Pope’s white-robed figure appeared. He took one shocked look at the horde let loose upon him, turned abruptly around and fled the scene.
A few moments later, his voice came over the PA speakers: “This is the Pope speaking. My blessings be upon you and your families. If you have any object with you you’d like to have blessed, now is the time to hold it up. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.” And that was it. It seemed preposterous to me then and still does today. Here was a genuine chance to engage people committed to carrying his message to the world, to get their feedback, to listen to their concerns, and if necessary to hear their critiques. But, as I knew already and as the world was slowly to learn throughout the whole of his pontificate, this was not a man who was prepared to do any listening even to his own clergy and his most devoted laity. He was highly courageous and single-minded, but at times at fault for his closed ears to everything but what he himself wished to hear, especially the sound of his own voice.
The American tour took in five cities—Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington—plus a visit to rural Iowa. My most vivid memory—apart from the incident of the solitary nun who dared to speak out and question the Pope’s stand of opposition to women priests during his speech to hundreds of women in religious orders at the cathedral in Washington—is of an outdoor mass in the great Mall in that city’s centre. As was his wont, John Paul II had waxed eloquently, at times even stridently, on his already familiar themes of the sins of birth control and abortion and of how priestly celibacy can never be abandoned by the Church. He was of course aware of pressure from the liberal wing of American Catholicism on all these issues.
As he ended the sermon and moved ahead with the Mass, I noticed several young, smartly dressed and sophisticated-looking women in their mid-thirties who had been moved to tears. They joined vigorously in the loud applause when the event was coming to its close. So I took the opportunity to briefly interview several of them as they waited to disperse. All were unanimous in their joy and in their admiration for the man. “What about his message?” I asked. They didn’t hesitate for a minute. One by one they said they really hadn’t paid much attention to it. Asked about the various issues raised, they laughed and said, “We don’t believe any of that at all.” One of them, who happened to be wearing a wedding band, actually opened her purse and showed me her birth control pills. Of course, repeated polls in North America and elsewhere reveal that nowadays the majority of Roman Catholics no longer follow the Vatican’s dictates on birth control or any other of the “hormone issues” either, if they ever did.
There was a certain thrill to some of the events—for example, being part of the papal motorcade with full motorcycle police escort for the press buses, with sirens screaming on every side as we rushed through New York on the way to a youth mass at Madison Square Garden. There they treated JP II as if he were a rock star, and he played the role of global celebrity to the hilt. Again, however, the young people loved the way he looked and sounded, but appeared to be paying little or no attention to what he was actually saying. There was, to my mind, an appearance of connecting but very little substance once the thrill of seeing a major world personality before them had faded away. I found myself wishing it were otherwise.
I returned home exhausted. Thankfully, it would be a couple of months before I set out on an unforgettable trip to India and Nepal, among other things to spend a week with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. She had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
My editors at the Star were immediately supportive when I proposed the concept of “Christmas in Asia” for four consecutive front-page features to run on the days leading up to Christmas 1979. The first and probably most important piece would be about Mother Teresa and her work in Calcutta. But I was also aware of two other people who were less well known but whose calling had taken them to Calcutta on the one hand and to a remote mountain village in Nepal on the other. Because of the unique forms their ministries had taken, I felt they deserved as much attention as the Nobel Prize winner. So photographer Bob Olsen and I were given the assignment. It was the most exciting journey of my career, and it changed my thinking about a lot of things. I had the opportunity to encounter Hinduism and Buddhism actually being lived instead of just hearing about them from lectures and books. Both religions, of course, have a much longer history than Christianity and, contrary to many predictions by missionaries and others, are reawakening and spreading in our time, rather than fading away. I found the things we had in common to be far greater than the differences. In Water into Wine I discuss the many wide-ranging parallels between Vedic or Hindu scriptures and the Christian Gospels.
This was the first visit to Calcutta for both Bob and me, and nothing we had read ahead of time had prepared us for the culture shock of suddenly landing in one of the most densely populated cities in the world. It is also one of the cities where the extremes of wealth and grinding poverty are most evident. Because of the sheer number of motorized vehicles of every size, shape and vintage—few if any of them with proper exhaust systems intact—and since the tens of thousands who have the streets as their only home use dried cow dung for cooking and washing, the air was constantly filled with smoke and fumes. The din was a constant, all-embracing cacophony. But a strange thing happened as you got used to all of that and looked behind and beyond to the people themselves. Calcutta’s streets teem with humanity in all its glories and shames. It’s hard to describe, but you somehow felt your appreciation of the full range of human emotions and inner depths gradually expanding. Even the poverty-stricken beggars had about them a dignity and a sturdy cheerfulness. There was a lot of joy on the faces and in the smiles of children and adults alike. At night, from the window of our hotel, you could see long rows of huddled figures sleeping on the pavement. Each with a shawl or a sack of some kind wrapped about his or her head, they looked like mummies.
Mother Teresa’s amazing efforts to help “the poorest of the poor” by feeding the hungry, caring for the orphans and comforting the dying are so well known they need no cataloguing here. She was very gracious with us. She agreed to be interviewed and photographed and personally escorted us through her orphanage in the heart of the great city. She went with us also to the House of the Dying in the precincts of a temple of the Hindu goddess Kali, and encouraged us there to join in helping to feed some of the dying patients. I was standing there feeling rather at a loss in the face of so many sick and dying people when she suddenly picked up a tin plate with a few chunks of bread on it and said, “Feed