c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Pope John Paul II often donned locally made vestments _ the special robes and accessories worn during Mass _ at the 104 trips he made outside Italy.

Before the pope visited San Francisco in 1987, Katreen Bettencourt was given the daunting assignment of designing and hand-weaving his attire.

“I had to make several design proposals that were approved at the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and then I had to send samples of the material to Rome to be given papal approval by somebody there,” said the 71-year-old native of Antwerp, Belgium, who now calls Eugene, Ore., her home. “They gave me nine months to do it all.”

That wasn’t much time, considering Bettencourt already had other projects she had committed to weave on her custom-made loom. The vestments also required cutting and hand-stitching.

Bettencourt, who had been a Cistercian nun in Belgium, learned her craft from Swiss Sister Marys Augustina Flueler, who revolutionized vestment making in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

“We were cloistered nuns, so we couldn’t get to her schools, but a teacher did come to our monastery to teach us,” Bettencourt said.

Eventually, Bettencourt joined a handful of other Cistercian Sisters when they were asked to relocate from Belgium to Our Lady of the Redwoods Monastery in California in 1966. She plied her trade there until 1970, when she left the religious order.

Bettencourt subsequently was married, and her husband, John, a machinist, created a pneumatic loom to her specifications in the mid-1970s, when she opened her own studio in San Francisco. She immediately received attention for the simplicity, dignity and beauty of her designs, all attributes that gained her the papal assignment in 1986.

Ultimately, the pinnacle of her career would be the creation of the spectacular white woolen garments the pope would wear at an outdoor Mass held in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.

“As we were planning for the Holy Father’s visit to San Francisco, we wanted to make sure we could include as much local flavor in everything for him,” said Sister Sharon McMillan, who was the director of liturgy at San Francisco’s St. Mary’s Cathedral at the time. “And here, in our own backyard, we had Katreen, one of the leading vestment makers anywhere. Of course, we asked her to help.”

Bettencourt’s vision for the papal vestments commemorated the modern design elements of St. Mary’s Cathedral, the 1971 all-concrete masterpiece by Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi who employed a technique using steel mesh brushed with cement mortar. He crowned the structure with four 190-foot parabolic arches that formed the interior’s ceiling, as well as interior creations resembling lacework.

For the papal vestments, Bettencourt borrowed elements of Nervi’s vision for the cathedral’s baldachino, an ornate canopy over the altar made of thousands of mobile, free-hanging metallic rods.

“The light from the windows above in the cathedral gave the baldachino a constant shimmering,” Bettencourt said. “It is gorgeous. I took those silver rods as the basic of my design and built that into the overall look for the vestments, using some metallic silver inlay against the white background” of the garments.

The garments included the pope’s outer vestment called the chasuble, a cloak and the pointed hat bishops and popes wear called a miter.

“While we waited for the approval for the vestments, we all worried that her design, which really was absolutely striking and simple, would be rejected,” McMillan said. “But then Katreen saw the pope wearing vestments that had been designed by Maori natives in New Zealand” that featured barbed-wire cross motifs, “and we knew we would be OK.”

Bettencourt began weaving the material in January 1987, and she finished the project well before the pope’s Sept. 18 outdoor Mass. Bettencourt also created vestments for six concelebrating bishops, a couple deacons and other accoutrements as well.

“Katreen had the foresight to know that the vestments would be used at other liturgies at the cathedral after the pope’s visit,” McMillan said. “There was an important continuity of the pope’s visit that was woven into those vestments.”

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Ever the stickler for details, Bettencourt said she was happy to learn that she would be invited to lay out the vestments for the pope and bishops before his Sept. 18 appearance, just to make sure no problems might arise.

“The pope had an RV that was converted for his dressing room at Candlestick,” she said. “This was all happening outdoors at the football stadium. So we were asked to lay out the vestments on the table inside. It was good that I was there because the pope’s master of ceremonies came in and laid out a different miter than mine.”

Bettencourt told the young priest that she had made a miter for the occasion, and she hoped he would use hers, not the one that had been brought from Rome.

“And he did,” she said. “Mine was only about nine inches tall. The other was maybe 14 inches tall. Too much. Mine was the right one for the occasion. It was a little less ostentatious.”

Although Bettencourt did not get to meet the pope, she was able to stand near the altar set up at Candlestick Park for the outdoor Mass, a crowning moment in a career that ended in 2000, when she sold her loom and vestment designs to Cincinnati-based Meyer Vogelpohl, a church-goods and vestment company.

Today, the garments Pope John Paul II wore are on display in the museum of St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco.

“It is a wonderful memory,” McMilland said, “to be a part of the history of John Paul II.”

MO/JL END RNS