A City Awaits A Pope

The gray, drizzly dawn breaks a little ominously. The Boston Common, almost always busy with some activity, is strangely calm early Monday morning except for the muted chatter of the National Guard MPs and the demanding squawk of their walkie-talkies.

Everyone on the Common wears a uniform. Those who don't wait outside, sleeping on the puddly cobblestone bundled in regulation down. And the Common itself wears the finest set of buttons and braid--15,000 specially painted 50-gallon oil drums and close to 18 miles of yellow polyester cord.

The sky is gray, and the breath of the guardsmen steams in the chilly air. But the military on hand know the bleak and hushed atmosphere will not continue long. The white altar, red stairs and yellow flowers, in the floodlit center of the Common, belie the spectacle that will take place in 15 hours. The Pope is coming to Boston, and the city readies herself.

If you try to interrupt the order of the scene, the guardsmen ask you firmly, not nastily, to leave. "No one goes past here," one says, drawing an invisible line. Obey, and you can banter all you want. Cross the mark, though, and suddenly the guard looks more imposing.

Inside the ring of the guardsmen, a few Boston police patrol the Common, wondering at the transformation of the beat they walk each night. One has been gone for four months, off work with a stroke. The altar pleases him; the thought that demonstrators may march on the Common scares him. Graying on the sides like middle-aged cops are supposed to, he worries about the day ahead. "One little thing can set people off," he explains. "You gotta nip it just before it gets out of hand." Another cop, just as Irish as the first, lists the kinds of "maggots" the observer will see. "There will be lots of wallet lifters, and some of the guys who just grab ladies' necklaces and take off with them; and then there's punks, and they just like to harass people."

A Boston College group arrives, six guys and a girl who walked six miles to see the Pope. One, a freshman from Elkhorn, Nebraska, wants to avoid TV cameras. "What if my mother saw it? Sleeping in the streets, cup of coffee in my hand like some bum, and I'll be back to Elkhorn in no time."

Sports activites on Beacon St. wind down as the crowd grows. Earlier, tall men on roller skates careened down the steep hill, in and out between the barrels. The yellow cord now makes that impossible, and anyway, it's getting time to start thinking about serious things, like jockeying for position inside the Common. "As soon as you get in there, spread out," Elkhorn advises. "Take up as much room as you can."

But nobody gets too tense. The bridge game among the St. Elizabeth's parish ladies continues on the sidewalk. A red-and-white taxicab pulls up and, out of the back seat pops an entrepreneur. "$1.75 for sandwich and coffee," he shouts. "Profiteer," someone jeers. "Don't you feel guilty making money off the Pope's visit?" another asks, but obviously the answer is no because the sandwich man is enjoying himself no end. "I hope you get leprosy," Elkhorn's friend yells.

Around the Common, the yellow and white banners flapped in the overcast dawn. Nice banners, but the stylized monogram is a bit tough to make out. "J.P.--John, Paul" one spectator decides. "No, John Portak. I have to get one of these for my brother," another says.

At 5 a.m. the subway starts to roll. Waves of passengers greet the frowning guardsmen. "This way, ma'am, stay on the other side of the yellow rope," the MPs say, and they all do as they are told, most walking down Tremont Street in search of a coffee shop. Dunkin Donuts, the first to open, sells 6 dozen donuts in under a minute, and the proprietor stares with dismay at the disappearing stocks of crullers and jelly-filled. "Shit, we need more donuts. I should have made more donuts," he mutters.

At the street corner, the Boston Globe delivery truck pulls up carrying the early morning edition of the city's largest paper. "City to Greet Pope Today," the front page blares. But for the Globe there is even more important news. The price of the paper has gone up 20 per cent overnight. The first subway crowd is clamoring for the papers, mostly because they realize that the hillside they will sit on for the next twelve hours is cold and wet.

Towards seven, the tension worsens, people hollering at the cops to let them in so they won't lose the places they earned by chilly endurance. The Secret Service insists on "sweeping" the entire Common first for hidden evil, a search-and-destroy operation that requires the pinstripe suit. When the guards finally give the word, the spectators dash towards the line of yellow and white barrels separating the notables from those who will sit in the same mud, but farther back.

The crowd isn't as big as some have predicted. By 10 a.m. there are still acres left unoccupied, and television monitors scattered in the far corners of the park look a little out of place. But a chattering stream of newcomers moves constantly across the Common, spilling out of the Park Street station. They are greeted first by a battalion of souvenir hawkers peddling commemorative medals, half a dozen brands of Pope programs, (the best of which has a full page of the holy father kissing the ground in different locales), dumb bumper stickers (I saw the Pope in Mass"), and blasphemous tee-shirts ("Pope Adds Life").

Closer to the crowded hillside, middle-aged ladies press devotional circulars on the crowd, urging them to visit Bayside, N.Y., "The Lourdes of America." Bayside, apparently, is run by a seer named Veronica Leucken. Her pamphlet includes a plea to the Pope to "convert Russia" and to "save the world from the great flames of the Ball of Redemption that fast approaches." She also inveighs against communion by hand.

Yellow-cuffed ushers hand out small programs with the words of Boston's archbishop, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, are blessed indeed to be the first to greet him on the shores of our generous, hospitable and beloved country," Medeiros says.

A new uniform has been added. The blue-suited state police file through the crowd in a long line, creating a momentary wound that heals as quickly as they pass on. The police presence, lessened during the late morning, reappears in force. The Secret Service sets up new barricades, mounted police begin to circle the Common, and the state forces line the sidewalks blue shoulder to blue shoulder in a hopeless effort to keep the paths open.

The Secret Service receives a bomb report, and four agents with a German Shepherd rush to the far corner of the Common in a Harley-Davidson golf cart. The dog decides that the bomb is buried underneath the stop light at the corner of Beacon Street and whines until his masters, relieved at the false alarm, lift him back aboard the cart.

The sound system, miles of wires and precariously perched speakers, gets its first test of the day at noon with recorded choral music. The verdict--great sound quality but a little soft, a defect that has the sound engineers from Donovan and Co. scrambling. They have to do a good job. After all, they took roll after roll of publicity photos Sunday night with their truck in the foreground, the altar behind. "Test 1, 2, 3, Test 1, 2, 3," echoes through the park. And the crowd, satisfied, cheers.

Altar boys find themselves with entirely new responsibilities as the afternoon wears on. The red plush carpet, covered all night with plastic like someone's aunt's living room furniture, is uncovered, and the Hoovers are brought out for a thorough cleaning of the rug His Holiness will tred.

Directly beneath the altar, in the parking garage press room, at least ten people are making use of the hundred-odd typewriters laid out on row after row of tables. The press struggles to cover the event, their efforts hampered because the press area is in the bleachers of the papal ballfield. The radio and TV people fight to get their equipment working; photographers jockey for front-row seats, but with most of the press corps aboard the bus following the papal motorcade, the major topic of conversation among scribes stranded at the Common is why the ladies delegated to serve lunch to the media refuse to open the sandwich line until 3 p.m.

By late afternoon, the boredom of the wait is over and only anticipation remains. The Pope has landed in America and will soon be celebrating Mass.

The crowd surges to the fence surrounding the Common to see John Paul, and they are not disappointed. The two-second flash of his profile, beaming under a wide-brimmed hat as he rolls by at 25 mph, is enough to introduce him to his following. But, minutes later, speaking from behind the altar into the driving rainstorm, his "program of faith" wins his audience forever.

He does it with good humor, laughing at the deluge. He does it with courage, calling on strife-torn Boston to forsake racial violence. He does it with simple humility--"the Pope is your friend," he says to the largest cheers of the day. But most of all he wins Boston Common with his larger-than-Catholic personality. People don't just honor or respect him, they fall in love, in part because that is what he wants.

When the service ends, and the crowd does its best to get home, the Boston Common looks much the same as it had the night be before. But the National Guard is gone, and in its place is something built by the Polish Pope and his rainsoaked Boston followers, made of stronger material than oildrums and polyester.

Crimson editors assisting in the coverage of the Pope's visit include Robert O. Boorstin, Susan K. Brown, Alexandra D. Korry, Oren S. Makov, Amy B. McIntosh, William E. McKibben, and Elizabeth H. Wiltshire.