A View From The Flock

(2 of 3)

"I just don't see why it is such a big flippin' deal that the Pope is coming here," said Suzie Rataj, with her parents and younger brothers weeks before the Pope's visit. Edward Jr., the eldest of Ed and Betty's children, is no longer Catholic; Anne, 20, remains with the church; 17-year-old twins Charlie and Tom attend Mass. ("It's a rule here, like keeping gas in the car," says Betty.) Suzie, 23, calls herself "nonpracticing."

Charlie, the smooth-haired twin, quotes a young cousin who, informed that the best Cardinal becomes Pope, asked, "So Mark McGwire will be next?" Tom, the twin with the hat, reports some of his classmates talking about scalping papal tickets. "The first thing that came into my mind," he says, "is that they're going to hell." That merits a couple of giggles.

They stop, however, when talk turns to John Paul's apostolic letter ruling out the ordination of women priests. "I wouldn't mind seeing some," says Betty. "But I think a lot of people would fall away. I think the church is not ready for it. "

"They just need to get ready," says Suzie. "I just have my 12 years of Catholic education, but I know the Bible was written by people in a society run by men, so women wouldn't be included in the power structure. But the Pope, who has studied the Bible his entire 78 years or whatever, cannot look at it and understand that it isn't because of God that women are not in the power circle, but because it was..."

"The custom," Betty finishes for her. Her thoughts drift to the upcoming visit. "It's not anything he says as a man. This is a person who, if he had been around at the time, Jesus would have said, 'You're Peter, and upon this rock I build this church.'"

"I'll make it easy for you, Suzie," Ed says. "Didn't the early church have women bishops?" The question is facetious; he sides with John Paul. "The Pope," he says, "is the Supreme Court. He's never wrong, because he gets the last word." Ed used to sympathize with arguments for the death penalty. But now, in the full force of John Paul's dissent, he says, "I have moved."

"Why can the Pope tell you to do it and you say O.K.?" Suzie asks.

"Most of the time I'll be all right if I rely on the church," says Ed. "They've accomplished a lot by moving very slowly and avoiding pitfalls. When the chairman of my law firm says this is the way we're gonna do it, that's the way it's gonna get done. When the Pope is talking about whether there are going to be women priests or not, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time raging about it."

"He wins," offers Betty.

"He wins," agrees Ed.

"Fine," says Suzie. "Then they could have their church."

John Paul's Catholicism is suffused with intercessory prayer and its necessary premises, the supernatural and the miraculous. That is no longer Betty Rataj's way. She has a formidable charitable schedule: the Immacolata Parish mission, the auction for her sons' De Smet Jesuit High School, her work for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. But as the papal visit approached, local priests asked congregants to offer up prayers for the Pope. The resulting pledges would eventually be presented to John Paul as "a spiritual bouquet." "Did I sign up?" asks Betty. "No. I would have forgotten. If I say I'm going to say one rosary, that sounds kind of stupid. But if I were to say I'm going to say 20, by No. 5 I'd have forgotten." "I do very little formal prayer. I talk to God, I chat about where I am. 'My God, what are we going to do about Suzie?' Or a lot of thank yous. But it's not like I'm saying Our Fathers or Hail Marys and going over for Eucharistic adoration." The admission makes her mournful. Betty watches the elderly, bent man approaching across the Dome floor in his Popemobile. Physical limitations notwithstanding, he is still handsome. He rolls to within 100 feet of her. Fifty. He is within 15. Betty Rataj, a trained mathematician, has been waving her hands approximately like someone trying to wash two adjacent windows. Suddenly she yells, "He looked at me! I swear he looked right at me! He waved at me!"

In the end the Pope doesn't even need to say "Hi, Betty." At the first amen her voice seems to catch a little. But she does not weep during the reading from the Gospel nor the recitation of the Creed nor the homily. Rather, it is something that he doesn't say that moves her. As he prepares for Holy Communion at the altar, the Pope bows his head and prays. Silently. Yet she still hears the blessing he is invoking: "May the bread become our spiritual food; may the wine become our spiritual drink." The unspoken words ring in her head, and she is overwhelmed: "The prayer he's saying is the same thing you hear every Sunday. That everybody hears. No matter where you go, people would know..." And that very universality, of which this man is still the vibrant center, overcomes her.

"It's so hard to explain," Betty says about being a modern American Catholic weeping at the sight of her Pope. "It's not a head thing; it's a heart thing. No, it's a heart and a head thing."