Papal visit

About a year ago, I came up from the subway (the underground) on to Lexington Avenue at 96th Street and ran into such a huge crowd on the north side of the street that I had to cross over to see what was going on.

It was a funeral service, just ending, at the Catholic church which stands in a shabby block between Lexington and Park Avenues. It was a large, dense and very sober crowd, mostly I guessed of onlookers, but many of them were dressed in what you would be right to guess was their best dress or, in these freewheeling days, their only suit. Very soon, the high doors of the church opened and a coffin was borne out by eight men pallbearers. They were followed by a cluster of grave men and women who were obviously relatives of the dead man.

It was the funeral of the old, cocky, unforgettable street urchin, James Cagney. A man standing near me said, 'I didn't know he was a Catholic. I thought he just played tough, Hell's-Kitchen types, the son of Irish immigrants.' So he did, but in doing so, he played himself and, as always happens when a famous movie star dies, the networks pulled out the old movies and ran them at nights as a memorial salute.

So we could see over again those Warner Brothers films in which it seemed that Cagney was always the bad boy of the family, Frank McHugh was the good brother and Pat O'Brien was either the neighbourhood friendly cop or the priest dedicated to reclaiming the soul of young Cagney. In perhaps the most unforgettable dying close to any of his movies, we saw him a gangster, ruined by the repeal of Prohibition and the treachery of his old gang, stagger mortally wounded along a street and fall, at last, sprawled across the steps of the nearby Catholic church.

That movie, called 'The Roaring Twenties', was made in 1939 and it would not have occurred to us at the time to expect the doomed and drunken Cagney to head for any other than a Catholic church. It would certainly have been a confusion in the plot if he'd turned out to be a relapsed Baptist or Methodist.

In the movies then, as in life in New York certainly, all the Irish were Catholics and in the movies then, in both dramas and comedies, the comfortable middle-class families, the people who ran things in their own small town or big city, had English names like the actors who played them, though many of them had had their original Russian or Polish or whatever name changed – Emanuel Goldenberg into Edward G Robinson. Danielovitch Demsky into Kirk Douglas. They'd been changed for them by the old Hollywood producers who, almost to a man, were immigrants from Russia or Poland. And their picture of New York in the Twenties and Thirties, when it was about poor Irish, was roughly correct.

About the people who seemed to be the upper crust, it was, even then, certainly wrong. It's been true for more than a hundred years that in this most polyglot of metropolises, the Anglos, people of English origin, no matter how far back the roots go, have had little political influence. Socially, they may still preen themselves on being some sort of American elite, but in politics, they suffer from the initial handicap of representing such a tiny number of the population. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the WASP, makes up only six per cent of the New York City population.

So we have to be more careful than most of our neighbours in sounding off about ethnic or racial or religious matters. However, we do have the advantage of being if not above the battle, at least at the remove of war correspondents or, in religious matters, of being comfortably ill-informed.

I asked a group of friends sitting around the other evening an innocent question, as if I hadn't the foggiest idea of the answer. 'Just how many Catholics are there in the United States, say, in millions?' The answers from native Americans who've been here all their lives varied from five million to 20 million. The answer is 52 million and rising. That's just about one American in four.

It makes you marvel that for the first 173 years of this republic, there's never been a Catholic president. The prejudice of the English and the Dutch and the German Lutherans and the Jews and the Scots Irish Protestants held a grip on the country long after, in many places, their own grip on government was loosening. However, as we all know, in 1960, John Kennedy made it. He went down to Texas early in his campaign and met the old fear head on. 'His religion,' he said, 'was a private matter.' And in any conflict of conscience in his presidential role, his first duty was to the Constitution of the United States. It broke the lock of the old prohibition.

Mrs Ferraro, who ran as Mondale's running mate in 1984, is a Catholic. Governor Mario Cuomo is a Catholic and if he were to declare himself a candidate – he has renounced the ambition – he would, according to all the polls, leap into position as front runner, leaving the seven dwarfs far behind. It's possible, it occurs to me, that the governor secretly suspects that the party might come running to him in desperation next summer. He has several times made the astonishing point of declaring that there is no such thing as the Mafia, which does suggest he's well aware that one qualified American voter in eleven is an Italian-American.

Well, that's a problem for Governor Cuomo. For most of the 52 million American Catholics, the next week will present problems that are closer to their hearts and homes than anything else that's happening around the world. And you've only to look at a map of the Pope's itinerary to see that this is no ceremonial tour.

The places he will visit and the speeches he will make have been plotted and worked over for the best part of a year inside the Vatican. And the route of his mission traces, you might say, the centres of American Catholic resistance to the absolute power of the Church. He began in Miami, Florida, first to meet and try to mollify the disgruntled Jewish leaders who cannot forgive him for his recent meeting with Austria's President Waldheim and who deplore the Vatican's refusal to recognise officially the state of Israel.

Well, that's a preliminary skirmish but Miami also confronted the Pope with the first huge outpouring of America's new Central and Southern American immigrants, the Hispanic population of Catholics who have their grievances, mainly of social and job discrimination in the racial stew of Miami and who, a Jesuit sociologist calculates, will sixty years from now constitute an actual majority of American Catholics.

On Friday, he was in South Carolina meeting ecumenical leaders. South Carolina, a fortress of Baptists and other non-conformists who can be as rigid as Rome in their own dogmas. On Saturday, to New Orleans which, because of its old Spanish and French heritage, has as long a Catholic tradition as any city in the country. It also has the only black bishop in charge of an American diocese and it was in New Orleans that the Pope was expected to face black priests and nuns and meet their demands for the Church to recognise what they define as the 'unique identity and experience of black Catholics'.

So on to the Hispanics again in San Antonio, Texas and then to Arizona to commune with Native American Indians, to Los Angeles for a conference of all 387 American bishops, north to Carmel and, there, possibly to proclaim at long last the sainthood of Father Junipero Serra, an old, lame Spaniard who founded the mission in the midsummer of 1771, by lifting a bell over the branch of an old oak and ringing it, and crying aloud to a solitary Indian, 'Come O Gentiles, come and receive the faith of Christ!' A postulator has been at work in the Vatican for well over 50 years documenting Father Serra's life to see if he may be sanctified. California Catholics believe it's none too soon.

Then to San Francisco for an outdoor mass and prayers with AIDS patients. Finally, across the continent to speak on social justice to Polish-Americans in Detroit, a flight north to meet Indians and Eskimos in Canada's Northwest Territories and back to Rome.

Everywhere, he's bound to be confronted with the pressing issues on which an actual majority of American Catholics either flout the teaching of the Church or actively disagree with it – the right of abortion on certain conditions, right of priest to marry, of women to be ordained. Three in four American Catholics believe in artificial birth control and think divorced Catholics should be allowed to remarry in the Church. And there are many other doctrines and practices of the Church which over half of American Catholics want to see abandoned or reformed and the opposition to them is well organised among the women ministers, the liberal bishops, the young novitiates, as well as the very vocal laity.

In the past week, I spent some time with two good friends, both lifelong Catholics, one liberal, the other a conservative. The liberal accepts the Pope's infallibility only on such matters as the divinity of Christ and the Immaculate Conception. In almost everything else, she weeps with rage at what she takes to be the Pope's insensitivity to the nature of modern society and to the need of the Church to grow by accommodation to a democracy, and that's the point that her conservative opponent seized on.

'Ah!' he said, 'A democracy. Well,' he says, 'we live in a political and social democracy. The Church is not a democracy. It is authoritarian, in the best sense. Catholicism is not a supermarket where the consumer can choose what he likes and put together his own religious package. If you don't like it here, why not try another religion?'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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