Posted: April 6

Mourning a very modern pope

I thought the streets of Quito, Ecuador, were packed for the Good Friday procession, but those crowds pale in comparison with the people now jamming the streets around St. Peter’s Square in Rome. Fortunately I went over to the piazza to take some pictures the day after Pope John Paul II died, and before the city of Rome put in crowd control barriers that now make it impossible to get into the piazza itself. One of the photos is on the sjweb home page; it shows an impromptu memorial of candles and comments taped to the marble base of a light stand.

At moments like these it is a great relief to be able to spend the whole day inside the Curia without having to fight through the crowds to get in or out. I cannot imagine what the funeral of Pope John Paul II will be like on Friday, since estimates run as high as three million people trying to attend his services. What draws my attention are all the cameras in the crowds: the big traditional ENG, shoulder-mounted rigs, but also more and more you see smaller digital video cameras; there was even one movie film camera. And of course, there are big monitor screens everywhere. The night that I was out taking pictures, the four screens in the piazza were showing the priests leading prayers. Cameras moved from close-ups of readers to reaction shots of people praying; the piazza was really an enormous TV set with all of the action being broadcast live. The mourners were participating in their TV show and could see themselves being seen.

Perhaps what I will remember about Pope John Paul II is his acceptance of television and communication as part of Church life. He became a celebrity whose news-worthiness draws the attention of the world’s news channels even after his passing. The Church could never afford to buy as much air-time as he has gotten. All of the satellite vans and the news commentators on rooftops surrounding the Vatican attest to a close working arrangement that has developed over the many years of his leadership. It makes me wonder whether we Jesuits have been paying attention. We remain married to the printed word, and not all that much at ease with the new visual culture even though one cannot get in or out of the Curia without bumping into someone with a television camera. There is a lesson here about reaching out beyond our traditional groups to a much wider public who mourn a Church leader who was more modern in some ways than we are.