20 years ago today

One of the quickest and most effective ways to feel old is to see significant events of which you were a part of hit temporal milestones. Such as 20th anniversaries. And so it goes that 20 years ago, on September 13, 1987, Pope John Paul II came to San Antonio and celebrated mass before 350,000 people on a site that is now occupied by a school and subdivisions.

When Pope John Paul II presided over a Mass here 20 years ago today, the two-hour liturgy was not only memorable for Catholics and historic for San Antonio, but the centerpiece event of his visit also illustrated the successful cooperation among several faiths.

The Mass — the only Sunday service on the pontiff's nine-city, 10-day U.S. itinerary — took place on land donated by a Jewish businessman, who worked closely with his Baptist partner and Catholics to secure the site, on which more than 350,000 people assembled Sept. 13, 1987.

I remember getting up early and driving with my brother John to El Campo, where we got on a bus chartered by the recently-created Diocese of Victoria. It was fairly full, but not packed, with a bunch of teens, a few pre-teens and a handful of adults. Our bus parked on an under-construction highway (what is now Stotzer Freeway, just about a mile away from Seaworld Texas) on bare gravel roadbed. I have never seen so many buses in my life, parked side-by-side in a line as far as the eye could see.


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It was hot, blistering hot, and we were sucking down water as fast as we could. The irony is that the night before, a huge line of thunderstorms blew through the state. It was pretty severe in Columbus, if I recall, and San Antonio had it even worse. They'd constructed a huge white ziggurat of a stage on the site, with what was supposedly a spectacular network of towers for the backdrop reaching almost 100 feet into the sky. Only the storms destroyed all of that. The towers, I mean. A lot of us wondered what they'd do, how they'd manage to rebuild anything in time, but the problem was solved by bringing in construction cranes and having them hold aloft shimmering cloth banners of white and green. The overall effect was nice and quite acceptable given the constraints the organizers were working under.

Some of the nuns traveling with us had brought along a big hanging flag-style banner announcing the Diocese of Victoria to hold aloft. Only they had to leave it behind because of security issues and the blockage of sight lines it would cause. There were loudspeakers on poles all over the place to carry the words and music from the stage area, but as with any outdoor venue, these were utterly unintelligible. When the pope arrived, he rode through the crowd in his famed Popemobile, as there were four or so large aisles kept clear which divided the crowd, along with several aisles that bisected them. Unfortunately, we were situated on one of the outer aisles, and the Popemobile didn't drive our direction. We did see the top of it over the heads of the crowd, however. Security was generally working hard to keep everyone in their assigned areas, so the two-hour mass wouldn't turn into a mosh pit or rugby scrum, but about halfway through, the guards started letting small groups of people from the back areas (like me) run up the aisles to a point maybe 50 yards away from the stage and altar to take photos. At least it seemed that close to me at the time. So there I was, with my parents' Canon 35mm camera, trying to manually focus a zoom lens and take pictures without any photographic understanding at all. Amazingly enough, a dozen or so shots from the day turned out. The thing that's striking is all the green on display. And although the face can't be made out with any detail, it's pretty obvious who the elderly man sitting in the center of all the hullaballoo is.

That's one of those experiences that will stick with me for the rest of my life. Although I strongly disagreed with some of his socially conservative beliefs and teachings, I don't know if there's another human being on Earth I'll ever respect as much as John Paul II. I'm very cynical about famous religious personalities in this age of feel-good mega churches, but John Paul II, that man was pious beyond all reason. He walked the walk. There will never be another like him.

While I didn't understand anything he said during the mass because of poor audio, it was a thrill nonetheless to hear his garbled voice whether speaking in Polish, Spanish or English (there was a delegation from Panna Maria, the oldest Polish settlement in the U.S.--a tiny town just east of San Antonio). But in surfing the web, I found one excerpt from his homily, and with all the environmental challenges facing us as global warming and climate change alter our planet, I think it an appropriate way to wrap things up.

Only the human person, created in the image and likeness of God, is capable of raising a hymn of praise and thanksgiving to the Creator. The earth, with all its creatures, and the entire universe call on man to be their voice.

-Pope John Paul II
San Antonio, Texas
September 13, 1987

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