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

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took her hand, kissed her head, bent close to murmur some words, and placed on her lap a small box inscribed with the words Totus Tuus (Totally Yours) and the papal coat of arms. When she opened the box, she found a rosary of white beads with a gold cross. Said De Martino: "If you had given me the whole world, it wouldn't have meant so much." A Boston cop who had been standing beside the chair began to weep. "I've got to get back to church," he said, and he walked away.

In the dimming twilight and rain, John Paul headed for Common, whose history serves as a reminder that Boston was once a center of religious bigotry. Quaker dissenters were hanged there in the 17th century. And while no Catholics suffered that fate, Protestants from Boston's North South ends staged organized brawls in the 18th century on Nov. 5 to determine which group would light a bonfire and burn the Pope in effigy that night.

Some people waited as long as eleven hours on Boston Common (everywhere in the U.S., John Paul ran late) and were thoroughly drenched. From the fringes of the throng, the brilliantly lit platform and altar looked like an ethereal spaceship radiating warmth. Many people back in the crowd had the strange experience of first listening to cheers for the Pope on their transistor radios and then hearing the actual sound following through the air like an echo. His white hair wet and plastered down John Paul led 300 priests, who waded through ankle-deep mud to hand out 60,000 Communion wafers that twelve nuns in Marlborough, Mass., had baked in a week of twelve-hour days starting each morning at 4:30.

Flying into New York City Tuesday morning, John Paul got a brief glimpse of sunshine, and his white robe glistened with golden light as he stepped off his plane at 9 a.m. Again a brief airport ceremony with dignitaries was enlivened by the Pope's ability to unstuff a shirt. Mayor Edward Koch introducing himself: "Your Holiness, I am the mayor." The Pope: "I shall try to be a good citizen." Then off for two days of shrieking crowds and perhaps the toughest hours of his trip, a series of wildly contrasting events that showed all the nuances and talents of his complex personality.

Tight police security — at times the cordons around him were four deep— kept the Pope from one of his favorite activities, working the crowds. But still he pressed the flesh with anyone he could reach, displaying a deft politician's hand that would have shamed Lyndon Johnson. The police had reason to wall off their charge: the FBI in Newark received a written warning that the Pope would be shot in Manhattan on Tuesday. The letter, purporting to come from the terrorist Puerto Rican Nationalist F.A.L.N., directed the FBI to an apartment in Elizabeth, N.J., where a submachine gun gun and several empty boxes of ammunition for handguns were found.

Harming the Pope, however, was the furthest thing from the minds of the people who greeted John Paul. "He waved!" exclaimed Miguel Vera, 30. "It's beautiful—as if it is almost God to me." The Pope found ample occasion to display his actor's gifts. He jokingly covered his ears as a crowd sent up deafening cheers. At one point he responded to shouts of "Long live the Pope!" with "You are right!"— an odd rejoinder that only John Paul