FAIRMONT, W.Va. -- The rosaries got here last Thursday.

Tom Harper, who wasn't altogether sure why he was doing it, had them in the hands of 231 children hours before the pope who had blessed the rosaries on Easter morning died.

		An Apostle's Journey This is one in a series of columns looking at how the life and death of John Paul II has touched his American congregation. Previous columns His visit to Polish Hill cherished but distant, April 4, 2005 Simple creed crosses time to keep faith together, April 5, 2005

"I wanted to do one last thing. I really loved this pope," he said.

He's an unpretentious guy surprised by his own deepening piety. Harper figures perhaps he wanted to thank God for the better job he'd received as a reward for stealing a set of rosaries atop a mountain in Ireland four years ago.

Maybe he wanted to say goodbye to the man he saw melting away in the past year. There had to be some reason a guy with a family to raise on a factory worker's wages dug $2,000 deep into his savings to buy a few hundred rosaries from the Vatican gift shop in the improbable hopes of getting them blessed by a dying pope.

Like most stories of faith, it begins in a fog.

"I'd gone to Ireland with a friend. We climbed Croagh Patrick. When we got to the top there was a kind of soupy fog," he said.

Croagh Patrick, the mountain on which St. Patrick is said to have prayed, is reached first on foot, then, at the summit, on hands and knees. It's surmounted by a small chapel. Harper stumbled through the murk and found himself behind the chapel, facing a statue of Mary, with a set of wooden rosary beads draped around the virgin's neck.

"I picked up the rosaries and they said 'Medjugorje' on them. I thought it would be neat to have them." Medjugorje is a pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the Virgin is said to have first appeared 20 years ago. "Then I thought, 'I can't take someone's rosary.' "

Harper swears he heard a soft, female voice. "She told me I could have them, but I had to display them," he said.

He pocketed the rosaries, went home to West Virginia, and hung them on the rearview mirror of his SUV.

Harper learned to pray a stolen rosary.

He began to order rosaries from the Vatican gift shop, which, in better days, presented them during John Paul's general audiences for a papal blessing. Harper gave a pair to a friend who began a novena, a series of prayers, on behalf of Harper's job search. A month later, he was hired by a pharmaceutical plant in Morgantown. In a world that asks spirits to prove themselves in concrete, that was enough to know he had, however unintentionally, done something right that foggy day atop a mountain.

As John Paul's health faded, Harper decided he wanted to make one last act of thanks. At prices ranging from $15 to $180, the Vatican gift shop sells rosaries that emissaries then cart onto St. Peter's Square for the pontiff to bless during open-air audiences. Harper e-mailed them. Could they send him a few hundred? They could, they replied, but getting them blessed by John Paul II now looked unlikely. The pope was deeply ill, unable to speak after a tracheotomy. General audiences were in doubt. The Easter blessing would be read by a cardinal.

On Easter Sunday the pope was six days from death. No one was certain he would come to the window overlooking St. Peter's Square.

John Paul's window opened and a frail man, clad in white, attempted to speak. He coughed, made the sign of the cross and blessed several thousand people and, in the arms of a Vatican gift shop employee, several hundred rosaries. The windows closed on a pope's final Easter.

Four days later, Debbie Poling, the secretary at Fairmont Catholic Elementary School, picked up her telephone. It was Tom Harper. His children are enrolled there.

"He wanted to know how many students were in our school," Poling said. "I told him 231. He wanted to know how many faculty and staff were here. I told him 24."

Finally, Poling thought to ask why he needed these numbers.

"I about fell out of my chair," she said. The man wanted to give each one of them a rosary blessed by the pope.

Last Friday, Harper showed up at the school with the rosaries. Poling asked him why he was doing this.

"Because he is the man. He is the man," Harper said. "I just want to do this because I want everyone to have a part of him."

Sister Mary DiDomenico, the principal, picked up the microphone to the public address system and told the students what they were about to receive. Use them for your confirmation, she told the younger ones. Girls, she said, carry them on your wedding day. She might have said more, but tears, small as they are, have a way of drowning voices.

The kids went home for the weekend. John Paul II died the next day.

On Monday a school parent asked Poling the name of the wealthy parishioner who gave the blessed rosaries to the children. Harper, a gangly, 6-foot-6-incher who looks younger than his 41 years, still chuckles at that one.

"I'm not wealthy," he said. "I just don't want for anything."

At Fairmont Catholic yesterday Sister Di made plans. Across America, Catholic schools and churches will hold liturgies on the day of John Paul's funeral.

"We'll have a picture of the Holy Father on an easel by the altar," she said. She has scrounged up black ribbons for the students. Eighth-graders will carry the bread and wine. Fifth-graders will bring flowers. Younger grades will hold candles.

One other item occurred to her. One of the children will carry up a set of rosaries and place them beneath the picture of the man who blessed them before he died.

Yesterday, Sister Di heard the full story of Harper's fogbound day on Croagh Patrick, of the voice, the stolen rosaries that stole back the soul that took them.

"That's amazing. Sometimes, we don't know," she said.

On her wall, a visitor noticed a framed quotation of St. Thomas Aquinas:

Be what you see
and receive
what you are.