c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The Phoenix heat reached 120, and still the suffering and dying gathered in their wheelchairs in the middle of an open stadium, patiently waiting for Pope John Paul II to grasp their hands and look into their eyes.

In New Jersey, pilgrims in their 60s and 70s stoically endured hours of rainfall for their one opportunity to be with the man they believe is the vicar of Christ on Earth.

On the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana, in the middle of Manger Square in Bethlehem, in a South Carolina football stadium in the heart of the Bible Belt, people both secular and religious gathered in masses to see John Paul tread upon political landscapes no pope before him had visited.

An extraordinary man died Saturday _ extraordinary because of the way he touched the lives of ordinary people.

As a reporter walking with these people in the footsteps of history, the unforgettable moments of papal trips did not involve the powerful personalities like Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro or Yasser Arafat. Rather, each trip was best measured in the experiences of people like jubilant Ramon Damian, a Mexican immigrant who said after sharing lunch with the pope in a Baltimore soup kitchen: “Holy God came to us today.”

Amid the spectacle, the politics and the celebrity allure, the moments that stand out are ones of individual transformation.

Few agreed with all of John Paul II’s positions on secular and church politics, but there was something about this Polish priest that people said allowed them to transcend for a moment their individual burdens _ whether it was the political and economic struggles of surviving in Castro’s Cuba or the terror of AIDS _ and experience a divine connection.

“It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to God and to man,” 44-year-old Vicki Koeblitz of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Gates Mills, Ohio, said after Mass with the pope in St. Louis in 1999. “When you think of the miracle of Jesus becoming man, and you look at him, I don’t know if you’re going to get any closer to God on Earth.”

But getting close to the pope isn’t easy. He doesn’t give interviews to the news media. He doesn’t appear on talk shows or “60 Minutes.” Access to the pontiff is limited.

Yet he demanded attention as the pre-eminent religious figure of the past quarter-century.

My first experience covering the pope was in Rome in 1985, reporting as the religion writer for the Buffalo News on a special synod he called on the 20th anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council. (Since then I’ve covered religion for the Associated Press and The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)

Two memories of that first assignment stick out. One was the leaders of the church timidly asking that Latin be among the languages translated because whatever they had learned in Catholic school and seminary was not cutting it anymore.

And the second was at the closing Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, where the pope presided over a service surrounded by the world’s cardinals.

Back in Buffalo, an active chapter of a conservative Catholic group called Catholics United for the Faith railed against guitar Masses as the bete noire of the modern church.

So it was a bit of a surprise to be in Rome, in the most traditional setting imaginable with the pope they loved surrounded by the church hierarchy, and the liturgical music is a guy playing a guitar.

But a synod within the walls of the Vatican was a somewhat sterile environment. The real fun _ for both the pope and those covering him _ came as he mixed with ordinary people.

At those times, the pontiff had the opportunity to interact with people for whom his presence had the greatest meaning _ those on the margins of society or facing their own crucibles of faith with terminal or debilitating illnesses.

Even the mighty could be humbled in his presence.

In Hollywood in 1987, the biggest names in the entertainment industry gathered to hear this international media superstar. They may have expected a lecture on morality in media, but what stopped Charlton Heston, Marlo Thomas and the rest in their tracks was a live video feed of a youth rally where a young man with no hands was playing the guitar with his feet. The pope, startling his security guards, climbed over barricades to embrace Tony Melendez and bless him with a kiss.

Years later, I talked to Melendez. The young man who was turned down for the seminary because he did not have a thumb or forefinger with which to hold the Eucharist had his own stories to tell about life after the papal kiss. He sang at a World Series and the Seoul Summer Olympics and touched others’ lives as the pope had touched him.

“Tony, because of you, we all have hope,” one deformed young woman in a wheelchair told him at a concert at the same Universal Amphitheater where he sang for the pope.

What he wanted to do, Melendez said in his autobiography, was “to hold her in my absent arms and let my tears mingle with hers.” He could not, but he realized from the moment the pope embraced him, “It was for this that I was born. It was for this that I came into the world.”

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Still, there was little to compare with papal arrivals.

This was the first pope in the modern age to travel widely outside of Rome, and wherever he went, the attention of the world followed.

At airports, kings and presidents arrived first, standing and waiting with everyone else to be in the presence of the spiritual leader of 1 billion Roman Catholics. Kids would skip school and adults would take off work on what would become unofficial holidays in each place he visited.

On his historic second visit to the United States in 1987, the stage was set for an epic struggle between Rome and its most influential and independent national church; and for a country immersed in what some would call the Decade of Greed to hear again and again about its responsibility to the poor and disabled.

You didn’t mind waiting in the open stands in the blazing heat of a Miami afternoon _ along with Ronald and Nancy Reagan and network news anchors _ because of the growing sense of drama and fascination.

In some places, the idea of a papal visit was so implausible that people living there, like biblical doubting Thomases, had to see with their own eyes that John Paul was being allowed in their homeland.

I spent a week in Miami before the pope’s 1998 trip to Cuba, talking with Cuban-American Catholics. Even with the trip less than a month away, the prospect of religious freedom was so incredible that one recent immigrant, a doctor, said after Mass in Little Havana, “When I see the pope in Cuba, I’ll believe that.”

At the Havana airport, bedlam broke out as Cuban-Americans _ many ending years of exile from their homeland to witness the papal visit _ embraced relatives and friends they had not seen in years.

Cubans awaiting the papal motorcade stayed for hours to get even the briefest glimpse of John Paul. “These are things that are like miracles,” said Pablo Perez, a 20-year-old member of the Communist Youth.

In the Middle East, where fractious politics had long made the pope’s dream of walking in the footsteps of Christ seem impossible, two children released white doves as the pontiff stepped off the plane in 2000 in modern Jordan, where Moses is said to have been able to see the Promised Land before he died.

In Israel, three children _ one Jewish, one Muslim, one Christian _ presented the pope with a bowl of Israeli soil to kiss upon his arrival. Rabbi James Rudin, the former director of Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee, wept beside me as we watched a Jewish president in a Jewish country greet a Catholic pope.

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John Paul drew crowds rivaling any world entertainer or sporting event. So who better to explain the attraction of watching an older man rotely reading sermons during three-hour Masses than the individuals who sacrificed to be there.

In his U.S. trip in 1995, security concerns required Mass-goers to get to events hours in advance. But even as they sat in the driving rain in Giants Stadium, many of the 80,000 worshippers looking down at the pope _ as a flyspeck on the field _ said they felt as if he were saying Mass for them.

“After today, if nothing else exciting or wonderful happens in my life, I will die a fulfilled man,” said 76-year-old Edward Pietro of Toms River, N.J.

Some of the most memorable moments of John Paul’s papacy occurred away from stadium crowds, when the pontiff had a chance to meet with people individually.

“It was just incredible. His hands were so soft and just childlike. He just radiates peace,” 21-year-old Linda Drabek, a double-transplant patient facing rejection of a lung, said after the pope individually blessed a group of severely disabled and dying people in Denver in 1993.

In Baltimore in 1995, the menu of chicken and rice casserole with peas and carrots was the usual fare served amid the whitewashed walls and simple black-and-white tiled floor of Our Daily Bread soup kitchen. But there was a sense the room had been transformed.

When the pope broke bread there, the parents of a severely disabled child were overcome with emotion in John Paul’s affirming embrace, and a young mother said her knees were shaking and she felt as if she were on Cloud Nine when the pope kissed the forehead of the 4-year-old son she had borne as a teen.

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Keeping up with John Paul was never easy.

During the 1987 U.S. trip, he visited as many as three states in one day, and reporters would have to cover each event, finding time to write and file stories on the fly. Wake-up calls could be at 4 a.m., awfully early for reporters who also burned the other end of the candle in cities like New Orleans, San Antonio and Los Angeles.

During the trip to the Middle East in 2000, as thousands of youths gathered at the Mount of Beatitudes, it was easy to travel back 2,000 years to when the multitudes gathered in the Galilean region overlooking the Dead Sea to hear Jesus proclaim the beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor, blessed are the humble … ”

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In his last visit to New York City, at a 1995 open-air Mass in Central Park, John Paul delivered a prophetic message to a city that would be shaken by terrorism: “Always be brave. Do not be afraid.”

In his last moments, I hope the man who spent a lifetime reassuring others had someone by his side to take him in their arms and repeat back to him the words the Bible says were spoken by an angel to the women beside the empty tomb of Jesus:

“Do not be afraid.”

KRE/RB END BRIGGS