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Meanwhile, at Living History Farms, which re-creates early life on three operating farms, the biggest crowd in Iowa history was gathering. By the time the papal Mass began on a 180-acre pasture shortly after 3 p.m., the throng totaled 350,000, more than double the 150,000 that descended on Iowa in 1959 for a glimpse of Nikita Khrushchev. Police cordoned off a 16-mile stretch of Interstate 80 and Interstate 35 and used it as a parking lot for buses that rolled in from Kansas, the Dakotas, Colorado, Wyoming, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Nebraska. The crowd included many teenagers in jeans and backpacks. Seventy-five high school students from Independence, Iowa, walked 130 miles to see the Pope.
The Mass itself was filled with pageantry and song. At the Offertory, farm families carried to the altar symbolic gifts of soil, hand tools and garden vegetables: peppers and zucchini from Beverly and Tom Manning of Dallas Center; potatoes and apples from Frieda and Ray O'Grady of Afton; ears of corn from Mabel and Art Schweers of Lenox. In his homily, John Paul praised agriculture and one more time called attention to the plight of the world's poor. He told the farmers, "You have the potential to provide food for the millions who have nothing to eat and thus help rid the world of famine." Summed up Mike Keable, a Catholic deacon from Minnesota: "The Pope is the glue that holds the church together. What better glue can we have?"
Thursday night John Paul flew to Chicago, where a crowd of 1,000, shivering in upper-40s cold, chanted, "Long live the Pope," outside his bedroom window at 10 p.m. John Paul appeared on a second-floor balcony and wagged his finger playfully at the crowd like a father telling his children it was past their bedtime. At 5:30 a.m. he was awakened by chants of "We want the Pope." Though he appeared weary at times, most notably Thursday night, he drew strength from the crowds. He told an Italian TV interviewer: "When I first arrived in New York, I felt tired and it looked like a very long trip. But now it's beginning to look too short."
It was at a Chicago seminary, in an address to more than 300 U.S. bishops, that he gave the most doctrinaire talk of his tour. His technique was typically deft; he quoted exactly from a pastoral letter that the bishops themselves had composed in 1976, and in effect exclaimed: How right you are! On divorce, he told the bishops: "You faced the question of the indissolubility of marriage, rightly stating, 'The covenant between a man and a woman joined in Christian marriage is as indissoluble and irrevocable as God's love for his people.' " On extramarital sex: "You rightly stated 'sexual intercourse is a moral and human good only within marriage. Outside marriage it is wrong.' " He condemned "both the ideology of contraception and contraceptive acts" and quoted approvingly the bishops' denunciation of abortion: "You clearly said, To destroy these innocent unborn children is an unspeakable crime.' " He told the bishops that they had properly distinguished between homosexual acts, which he said are wrong, and homosexual orientation, which deserves sympathy: "You did not betray those people who, because of homosexuality, are confronted with difficult moral problems." He also