Pope John Paul II's visit - 5 October 1979

There has been nothing in my time like the popular reception of Pope John Paul II.

Now of course the public exposure of any famous figure is magnified today by the presence everywhere of the television camera. And, having had a deal to do with the media myself, I know how easy it is by a careful placement of one camera to make the microcosm of the screen convey the feeling that a whole town, not just one building, is in flames; that not just one farmyard, but the whole countryside is at war; that not just a gathering of 100 people, but the whole population of a city has turned out to greet a rock group or a politician.

It's the whole aim of resort cities in what we call the "Sun Belt" in their tourist advertisements to leave the impression that the state of Arizona is one vast desert with all the wild flowers in bloom, that Florida is a continuous beach where tanned men and nubile girls bask on golden sands by a foaming sea.

I remember, it must have been 40 years ago, when a rather crummy seaside town in Florida wanted to boost its tourist trade, it did it with the wide circulation of a single photograph of a girl in a bathing suit beckoning to us from under a palm tree. A wry old professor, the father of American economic geography said, "This picture only went to show that constant photographing could not harm one tree". If the camera that took that beguiling photo had moved by six inches, it would have shown a run-down bar and trucks pounding along the two-lane highway close by the ocean shore.

But it is not possible to have cameras on trucks following the Pope along 10 and 20 miles of his route throughout Boston and New York and Philadelphia and balloon the actual numbers, the huge continuous throngs along the sidewalks who'd waited since dawn for the moment of a single cheer and waited, on those early days, in a misted drizzle. "The choice of the day for our meeting", he said down at Battery Park looking across to a ghostly Statue of Liberty with his hair awry and his cloak flapping, "the choice of the day was not the best".

None of us, I think, who saw some similar occasions can forget the arrival in New York of Eisenhower from the wars, the ticker-tape parade for General MacArthur, the delirium of a five-mile stretch of lower New York and Broadway when John Glenn came back from the first orbit. Pius XII, formerly Cardinal Pacelli, came here in 1936, an erect and sombre figure and he received an odd welcome. Paul VI too went to a Mass in Yankee Stadium in 1965 and the great crowds, singing and swaying, at nightfall is not easily forgotten, but these were understandably famous religious occasions.

The visit of Karol Wojtyla, the first Polish pope, has eclipsed all of them and turned a pastoral visit into an occasion of, you might say, national rejoicing. I doubt, I take that back, I don't doubt, I'm sure that no monarch, no astronaut, no statesman of any country could possibly have aroused the populations of the cities in the way of John Paul II. He said over and over that this is a pastoral mission, that he's here as the successor of Peter. He wore, at all times the fishermen's ring, as a pastor visiting his flock, but thanks to the personality of this pope and the steady eye of television on him, half the people of America felt at one with the ope for the first time in history.

I suppose people will try for a long time to come to analyse why this should be so. First of all, there is the plain fact that whereas before now the pope has been a remote and cloistered figure whose views on life came to us from published encyclicals and the briefest glimpses of him waving or intoning from the balcony of St Peter's. This pope was eager to come out from the cloister into the world.

The original cause, the invitation, for this American visit, we shouldn't forget, came from the Secretary General of the United Nations and with many a former pope, if he'd been installed in the television age, this would have meant an address to the General Assembly of the United Nations and the single Mass in some great stadium. But we have to put it down to nothing but the character of John Paul II himself that he used this invitation as the opportunity to go into cities in the East, in the Midwest, and meet and greet all sorts of people on their own ground.

He accepted the obvious itineraries down Beacon Hill and out on to the Boston Common, ticker-tape parade down Broadway, but he requested also to go into the slums of Rocksbury near Boston,and into Harlem and out to a humble church in Iowa and, always, the main message was to the young people.

So if you combine the novelty of television with the novelty of a gregarious pope, you have only to add the extraordinary personal charm of the man himself, his benign vigour, the unwavering waggish and tender smile he had at the ready for children held high; for blacks waving from behind a lamp post or a tree; the sudden gravity and gentleness with which he spotted and touched the handicapped along the way.

All this was magnified and kept by the surprise of his fine speaking voice, a sort of resonant intimacy that stilled crowds of 50,000, half a million, an assembly of statesmen and a Madison Square Garden teaming with lusty and mischievous kids.

There's another thing, and I'm sure that it has been the unforgotten ingredient of his triumph. Millions of Americans, Catholic, Jewish, religious and irreligious people who came here 80 or more years ago, from pilgrims in northern and central Europe, and people who came here in our time from Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, not least Poland, any of us who'd lived in this city for no more than 20 years know or have met scores of them. Such people escaped from repression and made a new life and here, perhaps more than anywhere, such people identify religion apart from any man who survived repression among his own people who, as he put it, before the Assembly of the United Nations "would be dishonest to the great cause of man if I should keep silent, I who come from the country on whose living body Auschwitz was constructed".

I should guess that the personal history of this pope in his young days certainly is better known to Americans than to any other people except the Poles. He was only 19 when the Second War broke out with the invasion of his country. Krakow, his hometown, was under Nazi occupation when his father, the non-commissioned officer,, died and the young Karol went to work as a labourer in a stone quarry and, after that, in a chemical factory and in the evenings acted in an avant-garde amateur dramatic group.

He had a couple of severe accidents from a streetcar and a runaway lorry, but once he was over a fractured skull, he began to study for the priesthood. This, in itself in 1943, with the Gestapo standing by, does not suggest an easy life; he joined what in fact was known as a "flying university", it was an underground seminary, with its location, if I may risk the simile, never more fixed than that of a floating poker game. They studied and prayed in cellars, cottages, garages, with a guard on hand. It took the liberation of Poland to make it possible for him at last to be ordained as a priest. Of course, he knew he lived his daily life among people who were tortured, imprisoned, whisked off one night and never to be seen again except as a bag of anonymous bones in a concentration camp.

All this is well remembered here and you could see the proof of it in the lined faces of many old immigrants and the tears of younger ones as he moved among them insisting on the joy of his faith. You don't have to be very old in this country to appreciate that the Pope's visit and the general triumph of it is it a startling thing in the America of 1979, it reflects a swift and dramatic change in the popular view of Roman Catholics and Catholicism. Two generations ago, labour exchanges and newspapers had little printed notices under their listing of available jobs, "No Catholics need apply".

Twenty years ago, no more, it was thought it was inconceivable that a Catholic could be elected President of the United States. One of them, a gamely and greatly popular mayor of New York, Al Smith, had tried it 40 years ago, but the politicians say that to get to be president it doesn't matter how many people are for you, so long as there are not too many people who hate you.

Al Smith was beloved in New – much of – New York City, but nationally, as a Catholic simply, he was also well hated and he went down before the hating legions of the Klu Klux Klan and redneck delegations from the Protestant South.

John Kennedy ducked the issue for a time, but was well advised that sooner or later he would have to face it as rumours and myths spread around the country that in any great political crisis his first advisor would be the pope. In a single speech in Houston, Texas he exploded this malevolent rubbish and no more was heard of it. It used to be only 30 years ago that Catholics were poorer, worse educated than the generality of Baptists, Methodists and certainly Episcopalians. Today, they are – outside the South – on the whole better educated and better off than these other denominations, but as the Pope reminded the 20,000 Catholic children in Madison Square Garden, an ordinary Catholic school education still entails sacrifice. American Catholics carry a double tax burden: they pay for the public schools and their own parochial schools, it's a grievance and an equity, if you like, that still burns.

Finally, if we are to find another and stronger clue to the mass feeling that John Paul II has arrived at home from home, we ought to remember that no other big country has grown in Catholic strength like the United States. Forty thousand of them in 1790, 21 million in 1938, only 40 years later, 51 million, one American in four, and the most rapid and high rates of conversion have been among American blacks.

It is something for the liberated and the hedonists and the politicians – not least the Communists – to ponder.

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