On Sunday, I managed to get out of bed after a late night sampling Rome’s karaoke bars to join 250,000 other curious pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter’s Square for Pope Francis’ first Easter mass – March 31, 2013. We squeezed through security and found a pretty decent view near the back of the square, and then pressed forward after the mass for the Pope’s traditional Easter blessing and Urbi and Orbi greeting to Rome and the world.
This event was my main reason for wanting to come to Rome this week. I decided to travel here with several classmates, more or less on a whim, around the time of the papal conclave in early March. I had been hoping to be here for the actual conclave, but in general I was curious to see the new Pope in person, find out the reaction of the crowds to Francis, and perhaps most of all, find out my own reactions to the Pope and being once again in the center of the Catholic world for its most important day.
I was back in Rome nine years after coming to the Vatican for Holy Week, during a year studying abroad in Europe. It was a strange experience. I was thrilled to see St. Peter’s, the Vatican Museum, the Sistine Chapel, and also to see Pope John Paul II, who would die the next year, up close. But, I remember at the time feeling a bit unmoved by everything, overwhelmed by the crowds, the art and statues and gold from all around the world, and wondering what it all actually meant, besides a check mark next to another entry on my tourist bucket list.
Two years later, I found myself in a small suburb of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, now considered to be one of the most dangerous cities in the world. I was there chaperoning twenty high school boys learning about the issue of illegal immigration from Mexico to the U.S., and trying to make sure none of them killed themselves or got lost.
As part of our trip, we spent time with an American Jesuit priest who ran a tiny parish in the town of Anapra. I can’t recall his name now, or the name of the small parish he ran, but I remember the work distinctly. The church in Anapra ran a community group to support female workers at factories around Juarez that were often dangerous and offering little in salary or health benefits. Another part of the mission was to assist migrants who had been deported back to Mexico after spending several days attempting to cross the desert into Arizona, among other outreach activities to a community struggling with poverty and violence.
My mind kept drifting back to the little parish outside of Juarez while I was standing in St. Peter’s this year, trying my best to pick out any Latin phrases I could recognize. The massive crowd stretching around the square and out onto the surrounding streets was surprisingly attentive and respectful, except for two pushy nuns and an idiot talking loudly on his cell phone.
Yet, most of them didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on. I initiated the sign of peace in our cramped section, and the responses from the congregation during the mass, even “Amen”, were rare. While there was a mixture of languages throughout the mass, including a reading in English, the majority of the mass was sung and in Latin, making it fairly inaccessible even for someone with ingrained knowledge of the cadence of a mass from 30 years of experience.
However, it was also again clear to me that the vast majority of the crowd was in St. Peter’s for the tourist attraction and spectacle, rather than a religious service. I suppose I was too, to a certain extent, and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that, but it speaks to some cognitive dissonance about what the Vatican is all about.
I felt this even more acutely after the mass ended and Francis drove around in an open-air Pope-mobile. The crowd went bananas, and you couldn’t really see anything due to the cameras and ipads raised in the air to catch a picture. It was as if the mass itself had just been an obligatory pre-game event everyone had to get through in order to experience the main event of waving at the Pope and taking pictures inside St. Peter’s Basilica.
As I reflected on all this in the days to follow, I realized the disconnect the Church seems to have with itself is similar to the disconnect I personally feel with the Church. This Easter came at an interesting time for Catholics, with a new Pope who preaches and practices simplicity. Francis was soft-spoken during mass but became very animated during his blessing and greeting, focusing on calling for peace in troubled places around the world. All of this is positive, and certainly a break was needed from the tone-deaf papacy of Benedict.
But, while much is made of Francis coming from Argentina, the papacy and the center of the Church remain in Rome. The Vatican is full of history and beautiful architecture and world-famous art. It is phenomenal to look at, but the connection with the deeper meaning and purpose of the Church’s mission is harder to figure out. People from all around the world were here this week, but seemingly only to take pictures with their ipads, buy knick-knacks from the countless souvenir stands, and cross another site off their tourist bucket lists.
Again, there is nothing necessarily wrong with tourists coming to see the Vatican. But, ideally, the Church is supposed to be something more than a tourist attraction. The gospel stories read out during masses in both Juarez and Rome certainly speak to this, and plainly call to follow the example of Christ in making a preferential option for the poor and opposing authorities that are pious in appearance only.
This is what the Church was doing in Juarez, at least from what I could see, but in Rome the focus seems to be on keeping up the grandeur surrounding the Vatican and making pronouncements from time to time about the evils of homosexuality, contraception, married clergy, and women priests, among other social positions showing how far behind the modern Church is from the rest of the world.
The challenge for the present-day Catholic authorities in Rome is to reconcile these two churches; the active, vibrant parish in Juarez, clearly focused on the poor and marginalized, and the inflexible, grandiose, anachronistic hierarchy entrenched in Rome. And this is the challenge for myself as well. I have no regrets about coming to Rome for Easter.
Certainly St. Peter’s is a place everyone should see in their lifetime, if possible, and it was moving to see how Pope Francis could cause so much excitement in such a big crowd. But both me and the church authorities need to keep remembering the example of the church’s work in Juarez, as well as the example of Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Perdro Arrupe, and countless others from the past and present who never cared about tourist attractions or Michaelangelo paintings, and instead focused on what the example of Christ called all of us to do; that is, to focus on caring for the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed both in our homes and around the world.
Hopefully some of the 250,000 people in St. Peter’s took some of that away from their Easter trip, hopefully Pope Francis will remember it as he gets more and more used to the comforts and grandeur of the Vatican, and hopefully I will remember it too, as I continue the process of figuring out my place in the Church, and the world.