The Pope In America: It Was Woo-hoo-woo

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crowds of strangers seemed to become, for at least a little while, a community of friends. They serenaded John Paul with Getting to Know You and He's Got the Whole World in His Hands, and in New York City they had to be shooed away at midnight so that their singing of the Polish national anthem would not keep him awake.

The warmth inspired by the Pope's presence poses a conundrum about the man and his views. Although Mexico is largely anticlerical and Poland is Communist, the vast majority of their citizens are Catholics who have been reared from infancy to respect the papacy. But the U.S. is a pluralist, secular, sexually permissive society, and in the past two decades Americans have come to view with suspicion all institutions and authority, social, political or religious.

Even the 50 million American Catholics harbor attitudes that must be deeply disturbing to their Pope. An Associated Press-NBC News poll released on the eve of John Paul's visit showed that most of the Catholics questioned were rejecting parts of what the church and the Pope were preaching. Of those surveyed, 66% would like the church to approve the use of artificial birth control, 63% believe it is all right for a couple to get a divorce even when children are involved, 53% think that priests should be allowed to marry, 50% even tolerate abortion on demand. Those stands put them in the sharpest opposition to John Paul II, a firmly conservative occupant of the Chair of St. Peter. One indication of his uncompromising views: the austere Pope Paul VI got 32,357 requests from priests to be released from their vows and granted all but 1,033 of them; the warmly human John Paul II has not released one.

That John Paul nonetheless won the hearts—if not yet the minds—of many Americans is partly a tribute to the uniqueness of his office, one that gives him the most imposing pulpit in the world, and very largely a result of his simple humanity. His spontaneous delight in baby kissing, in bantering with crowds, is needed proof that the head of even an enormous and tradition-bound institution can lead with affection and empathy.

There may also be a deeper reason for the reaction to the Pope: in the U.S., as in other wealthy nations, many people, vaguely uneasy about the materialism of their lives, yearn in varying degrees for higher values and are even amenable to some fatherly chiding. John Paul sensed that mood and appealed to it in every one of his U.S. addresses.

This is a Pontiff who does not pontificate, but neither does he budge from any of his stands. In Philadelphia he asserted that he would not permit the ordination of women or married men, saying it is not "traditional." In Chicago, speaking to American bishops, he dramatically emphasized papal condemnation of birth control, divorce, abortion, extramarital sex and homosexual sex.

But John Paul saved his doctrinal fire primarily for specifically Catholic—indeed clerical—audiences. In the huge crowds, he made only glancing references to many of his most hotly disputed positions and chose instead to concentrate on aspects of the religious message as important as any thou-shalt-not preachments: peace, brotherhood, respect for human rights, the sharing of love. In Harlem he spoke of religious joy, in full knowledge of how seldom that emotion is felt on those mean streets. Said he: "How