Behind the smothering barrier of Vatican pomp and tradition, Pope Paul VI has often seemed a cold, formal and essentially unsympathetic figure — an uncomfortable clerical prisoner of the baroque ecclesiastical past.
Something of the real man behind the ermine curtain came through on his historic trips to the Holy Land and to India. And last week, when the Pope undertook still another precedent-making voyage, a 32-hour pilgrimage to the U.S., the world saw still more of the real Paul—a kindliness and inner warmth that displayed once more the man's humanity.
Fatigue & Peekaboo. "You have before you a man like you, your brother " Paul told the U.N. For once, it could be believed. Nudged and cheered by surging crowds, kept under all but constant surveillance by television cameras, Paul appeared no less the spiritual monarch but more the appealing human being. Like other men, a Pope can suffer from the cold—a fact made clear when Paul alter a momentary breath of the 44° weather that greeted him in New York abruptly switched from his open-top Lincoln to an enclosed limousine for the ceremonial motorcade through the city Popes, too, can tire: unerringly, cameras zoomed in to catch the lines of fatigue that etched his lean, ascetic face. And no more for the Pope than for other men will blustery winds die down at will. Time and again the Pope had to clutch desperately at his white zucchetto (skullcap) to keep it from sailing off into the air. During his farewell speech at Kennedy Airport, a stray gust whipped Paul's cloak over his head and face—and for an incongruous, hilarious split second, the spiritual leader of 584 million Roman Catholics looked like nothing so much as a grownup playing peekaboo with the children.
Far more typical of his personality was the calm, winning grace with which he carried through the exhausting ritual of his visit—and with which he happily departed from protocol when the spirit moved him. There was visible friendship and affection in the two-handed gesture with which he saluted crowds, in the avuncular kiss with which he rewarded a child.
Preference for Sea. It was conceivably the longest day that Paul had ever spent. The pilgrimage began shortly after 5 in the morning—after midnight New York time—when Paul, with an entourage that included seven cardinals, a dozen other papal aides, and 60 newsmen and photographers, boarded a chartered Alitalia DC-8 at Rome's Fiumi-cmo Airport. On the nine-hour flight Paul slept only a little, played the considerate host. He left his isolated forward cabin twice to visit the newsmen, handed out commemorative medals,' amiably posed for pictures and answered some questions. "I know you are a bad air traveler and prefer to go by sea," he reminded Australia's aging Norman Cardinal Gilroy. Replied His Eminence gamely: "Traveling with you this way is different."