Saturday, January 24, 2004

ROME -- The lights are still on in the pope's rooms. He is old now and spends his days in the topmost corner of a building on St. Peter's Square.

A January rain, cold and soaking, has glazed the cobblestones. The huge Vatican creche, its wise men draped in fluttering, cloth robes, hunches between two chattering fountains.

Beneath the pope's window a couple embraces. They kiss, tighten their hold and stand in the pale light that falls from the rooms of Il Papa.

A police car sits at the foot of the Basilica steps. Its occupants read books.

"You guard the pope?" I ask one. He looks up, startled.

"Yes. Guard," he says.

"How long will you stay?"

"I stay all night," he says.

Is he ever invited upstairs to see the pope?

"Never upstairs," he says.

Does the pope ever pull back the curtains and look out the window? The policeman shrugs and returns to his book.

It is 10:31 p.m. and the lights go out in the windows.

One of the bleak notations on the world agenda has been the impending departure of Karol Wojtyla, 83 years of age, unable to walk or stand, a man who is wheeled like an artifact from event to event. News agencies have invested tens of thousands of dollars in pre-booked rooms and camera stations aimed at the corner of the Sistine Chapel from which the cardinals send up smoke signals when a vote is taken on a successor. A shredder and telephone call would work just as well for burning the ballots, but this is a place of tradition. To an extent.

To assure the proper color black smoke to signal an impasse, white to announce a new pope chemicals are added to the fire.

Everything is ready except the pope. He continues to live. His voice might falter, his hands might shake with Parkinson's disease, but the intellectual and spiritual acuity required of a pope are all there.

"He reminded me of things from 1979 when we spoke," Bishop Donald Wuerl said after a morning visit. Karol Wojtyla may be weakening, but the pope seems strong.

Jim Nicholson, U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, also visited that morning.

"They have an expression here: 'The pope keeps outliving his successors,' " Nicholson said.

A private audience with the pope ordinarily consists of a photo-op. A visitor is taken in, leans down to deliver a greeting, hears a few polite words, is handed a rosary -- red for women, black for men -- and departs. A contingent from Pittsburgh was ushered in last week and the few that could make out his words recall him saying, "Yes."

This is not to say the visitors leave unaffected. The Pittsburgh visitors were misty eyed, some of them. One blurted out, "I love you, Holy Father." When a man is the successor to St. Peter, a simple look can be enough.

Waiting at the gates that day, I spoke with John Donahue, expatriate Pittsburgher, reformed stockbroker and present seminarian. He left Wall Street in the early 1990s, unmoved by the power of the financial markets. He went to Rome where he wandered by luck or destiny into a meeting with Wojtyla.

"He didn't say anything to me. He didn't need to," Donahue said. "That handshake. I wasn't content with the business world after that." Donahue joined the Legionaries of Christ, a fastidious order that demands more than a decade of training.

For Donahue to change his life entirely, the Pope didn't even have to say yes. Some things are simply understood, such as the encore the Pope requested when the Pittsburgh Symphony, spent after 72 minutes of thundering out Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, was asked to play the final page of the piece one more time -- an encore for a man with fewer and fewer evenings out left in him.

They played the choral finish:

Nobody had to ask the old man what that one meant. It is an article of faith that, when the lights go out inside Karol Wojtyla, the ones in his windows will shine on above lovers in the square of the apostle.

E-mail this story   Print this story