Traveling through history with John Paul

Still using the media to send out his message
That flight was significant to me for another reason though, because it would be the last time John Paul came back to the press section of the plane to answer questions. It was January 1998. With great effort and a left hand shaking very hard he spent a good 20 minutes with us, and gave Castro a few hard knocks for oppressing religious freedom. 

John Paul was very clever in his use of the media with these airplane sessions. He knew that the technology now allowed us to communicate with the ground in flight, so the wire services would move his comments within the hour, sending a public message to the leaders of the country he was visiting.

Especially in trips to dictatorships and authoritarian regimes he would use this tactic to great effect, but this time there’s a funny story to go with it too. The airplane phones that cost $10 a minute with a credit card swipe didn’t work on this Alitalia plane, so the only way to call out was on a satellite phone.

Satellite phones back then were the size of a laptop computer and the lid worked as an antenna that had to be pointed at the satellite. The only guy with a sat-phone on the trip was the Polish TV correspondent.  He was able to get a signal out of the left side of the plane, which was a very large Airbus.

The lead wire reporters — the Associated Press’ Vic Simpson and Reuters’ Phil Pullella — were in a bidding war with cash to be first to call out.  A long line of other journalists were crowded behind them. Satellite phone minutes were extraordinarily expensive so the Pole was raking in large dollar notes from this hankering horde.

Eventually so many people had gathered around the sat phone that the plane began to list to one side, and the flight crew rushed back to order us to get back on each side to balance it out!

But the word got out, and Castro was put on the defensive before the pope even landed.  And that’s the last news conference Pope John Paul II would ever give.  It would also be one of the last times the pope would be “newsy.”

With the exception of his trip to the Holy Land in the year 2000, the focus was no longer on what the pope said or did, but on how sick he was, how frail he looked, and how long he could lead the church in his condition.

Last trip alone
His death this month was still a shock for those of us who are part of the Vatican press corps.  It was the most anticipated death in modern times, and yet the finality took us all aback. The stunned hush that hung in St. Peter’s Square the night of April 2 was so strong you could almost touch it.

The following Monday morning those of us in the Vatican press corps were brought up to see his body before it was transferred to public viewing in St Peter’s Basilica. We stood in a long line for more than an hour. We talked to each other about how strange it was, and how us standing together in a pack felt like another pope trip.

That feeling would grow in me as I experienced the mind-boggling crowd that lined the entrance to St. Peter’s for the days and nights preceding the funeral. There were millions of people there, just like at his most popular venues in big Catholic countries like Mexico and the Philippines.

At night the atmosphere on Via della Conciliazione, the huge boulevard that leads up to the square, became positively surreal. All these people packed together, more than half of them under 25, who had known no other pope, standing patiently, smiling amid this Renaissance architecture while watching huge jumbotron screens that lit up the night with high-tech 3^rd millennium live television of the body inside the church.

It felt to me like this really was another pope trip, but this one was different. It really was the last one, because he was going home, and we couldn’t go with him.

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