I don’t much care for the Pope. It’s nothing personal, and in fact I admire part of what the Pope decrees, especially concerning humanity’s duty to alleviate poverty, suffering, and pollution. What bothers me is that there’s this central cloistered figure controlling a religion while isolated from the social realities of the people who he spiritually and morally guides. To disallow women and married priests, birth control, abortion, and hamburgers on Fridays just seems hopelessly out of touch. But whatever. It’s their party.
All this pomp over Pope Benedict’s visit has prompted reminiscing of the year 1995, when I was an unwitting pilgrim to Pope John Paul’s visit to New York City. The Friday night of that weekend, I took a Peter Pan bus from Amherst to visit my best friend AS at Columbia University. Somewhere in my insulated collegiate mind lurked the knowledge that the Pope would be in NYC that weekend, but the implications didn’t hit me until the bus was stopped on I-95 for literally hours. An equally clueless college student asked the driver what was going on, and he just grunted “Pope.”
The next day my friend AS, her sort-of boyfriend C and I decided to try to glimpse the Popemobile. We headed to the general vicinity where the Pope was known to be and wandered through the crowds of Catholics. Many of them were Hispanic and clutching trinkets of Catholicism and praying. No one seemed to know where the Pope was, or at what point he would become visible.
I should add that my companions and I were total little punks. AS had a shaved head with bright green bangs, C had an intricate motif of colored spikes, and my blond hair was partially in dreadlocks that never quite held. We wore patched army surplus and sported various facial piercings. Soon there was a crowd of people from Central and South America taking pictures of these strange young Americans. A woman from Germany approached us with a video camera and asked my friends if they would like to be in her documentary about bagels. (I should add that, due their wilder hairstyles, AS and C received most of the attention. I threatened to stick a safety pin through my lip to upstage them.)
Soon we tired of being the absent Pope’s freak sideshow and headed over to St. Mark’s Place. I don’t remember anything else about that weekend except getting the hiccups for about two hours. I returned to Amherst and regaled my friend AB with tales of my pilgrimage, and she said “Who gives a Pope about Pope?” and laughed her insane devil-may-care cackle, which inspired an odd inside joke for about a week in which we’d say things like “Who gives a Pope? I don’t give a Pope. Man, that guy just doesn’t give a Pope.”
