A View From The Flock

His doctors had told him to skip St. Louis; and by the final day of John Paul's visit it was clear why. At a prayer service in the city's beautiful basilica he coughed--not continuously, but so deeply that his body jumped forward slightly. His speech, clear enough at a youth rally the night before to elicit roars of laughter, was more slurred. A short prayer he should have spoken was assumed by an assistant.

But there were also reasons why a frail 78-year-old with Parkinson's spent two hectic days in the river city. One was that by hopping from deeply Catholic Mexico City to Catholic-founded St. Louis, he stressed solidarity within the huge territory that, despite political and economic disparities, the Vatican likes to call simply "America." Another was Archbishop Justin Rigali of St. Louis, a beloved adviser. The third reason, more subtle but equally important, might be dubbed Betty Rataj.

Betty Rataj has beaten the clock. The alarm is set for 3:30 a.m., but like a kid before Christmas, she is up and about in her red bathrobe 10 minutes early. Outside, the St. Louis suburb of University City is asleep. But on the Rataj month-at-a-glance calendar, a crisp notation--"B&E;: Papal Mass"--dictates an early start. Betty, 50, comes back down the hall with a black suit on and a pin-striped, bleary-eyed corporate lawyer, her husband Ed, in tow. She glows. "I woke up smiling," says the mother of five. "I think this is the greatest thing that could happen to an adult Catholic." Even one who, like most American believers, is still sorting out her feelings about the head of her church, 20 years into his tenure.

Roman Catholicism as practiced in America is not a consistent phenomenon. The day after John Paul left Missouri, Governor Mel Carnahan commuted the sentence of a convicted triple murderer from death to life without parole. Carnahan, a Baptist, announced that "I continue to support capital punishment," but after the Pontiff's "direct and personal appeal...I decided to grant his request." The irony is that while the Pope's argument that "the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil" may have swayed Carnahan, if only temporarily, Gallup polls find 53% of the Catholic American flock rejecting the position. In a TIME/CNN poll conducted last week, 86% of those responding declared they found it "possible to disagree with the Pope on articles of faith and still be a good Catholic." Such cafeteria Catholicism may not track logically. But it makes emotional and cultural sense, in the same way as Betty Rataj's twin assertions that "The Pope is rarely mentioned in our household, and rarely mentioned as part of our Catholicism" and "Being in his presence would be being in the presence of the most spiritual being that exists on earth. If he said, 'Hi, Betty,' I would burst into tears."

Her first Pope was Pius XII. Her parents found him "a bit sour." Growing up in Lebanon, Ky., Betty Spalding went to confession, heard Mass in Latin and wore a demure chapel veil. She prayed avidly: "I was adding it up, earning heaven." In junior high school the nuns told her that John XXIII, Pius' successor, was "opening the windows of the church, and that appealed to me." Not that she would dream of contradicting a Pontiff anyway. "If the Pope said it, that was fine with me," she recalls.

By 1968 she had revised that stance. Thanks to John's Second Vatican Council, Mass was now in English and the priest and congregation interacted. In retrospect, she thinks this may have kept her in the church. But in that year John's successor and the council's inheritor, Paul VI, loosed a thunderbolt: Catholics could not use artificial means of birth control and remain in good graces. "No way," says Betty. "No how. Period."

Suddenly the Pope was neither remote nor abstract; he was in Betty's bedroom. "For the first year and a half after Ed and I were married in 1970, we were not in a position to have any children," she says. "I saw Paul VI as representative of a very conservative Vatican. Obviously these people weren't out in the trenches." Like many American Catholics, Betty and Ed embraced a concept extolled by liberal American clerics: "We heard, 'a matter of conscience,'" she says, "and we declared birth control to be one. We would decide it according to our own good consciences and the Pope could go...be a Pope."

White bulbs on a hot baby-blue background: the message board in the St. Louis Trans World Dome scrolls WELCOME TO THE EUCHARISTIC CELEBRATION WITH HIS HOLINESS JOHN PAUL II. The Dome's 70,000 capacity is stretched to 100,000. Betty and Ed, after hours on a chartered yellow school bus and in line for metal detectors, have drawn spectacular second-row seats: they can almost touch the stream of priests flowing across the floor toward the great papal seal. A jumbo screen shows the approaching Popemobile, just half an hour away. She twists a silver ring again and again around her middle finger.