MASS IN ORDINARY
Elie, Paul
Paul Elie MASS IN ORDINARY The pope in my park Anna Quindlen once said that the main effect of Vatican II in her parish was that women no longer had to wear hats to Mass. This remark captures the...
...Fifteen minutes later, we found ourselves at the Delacorte again...
...Not so...
...I stopped at a record shop, looking for the Y'All CD, and bought some light bulbs at the hardware store...
...I was home by one o'clock, a whole day still ahead of me...
...The Mass went as has been reported: the readings in Spanish and English, the effusive homily, the intentions in many languages, the pope's quavering rendition of a Polish carol, the Communion hymn sung by Placido Domingo...
...The key demographic trends in the church in the U.S...
...Where were we supposed to go...
...At the kiss of peace, strangers shook hands, same as always...
...At the theater, a husky guy wearing an earphone pointed out that I was just general press...
...All that was doubtless true-but what struck me as profound about the Mass on the Great Lawn was the ease and everyday bonhomie I saw in the people around me...
...Couples clutched on their way to brunch...
...It was a perfect tableau of his papacy...
...Even the local-color stories stressed the extreme and the ecstatic: the faithful who anticipated the pope's visit for over a year, rose at an ungodly hour to get a good place to stand, then wept as he arrived, overwhelmed by the experience of a lifetime...
...I spied another of my kind, a woman with a pass dangling from a chain around her neck...
...Behind us a woman in a baby-T and jeans rolled her hips so her tanned belly showed to best advantage...
...Granted, I was able to regard the event as ordinary because I was spared the ordeal of getting a ticket...
...We ended up in the crowd a third of the way back on the Great Lawn, just close enough to distinguish the pope's yellow vestments from the white vestments surrounding him...
...Claudia and I were dressed as though for a morning of picking apples or raking leaves-she in a red sweatshirt and black jeans, I in a Patagonia pullover- and we might have been out of place among the faithful representing their parishes...
...For Communion, hundreds of priests scattered through the crowd, each accompanied by a Boy Scout who sheltered him from the rain with a yellow-and-white umbrella...
...This most spectacular of Masses celebrated, and sanctified, the ordinary...
...There I went, but was finally directed to 86th Street-where a police officer told me to go to the Central Park police precinct house...
...This remark captures the mood at John Paul II's Mass in Central Park last month, which made clear just how deeply the church of starched wimples and pressed school uniforms has become reconciled to the trappings of American culture- not so much the culture of death but the culture of T-shirts and baggy jeans and body piercing, of picnic blankets and The Wave-and made these changes seem, for a morning at least, a good thing...
...We're better off here-this is where the real story is," Claudia said...
...No lottery for me: I simply wrote to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a press pass was waiting for me...
...Up ahead four Hispanic women wearing roll-up plastic rain bonnets took turns standing on an overturned bucket...
...No umbrella came our way, though: I received from a Hispanic priest who, lacking a chalice, proffered the sacrament from a sandwich baggie...
...No one had dressed up for the experience of a lifetime...
...She was right...
...The crowd roared, and we looked up-and there, less than ten paces away, was John Paul, waving from his pope-mobile, framed by the arch of the metal detector and the canvas canopy of the press tent...
...The pope gained presence as he exchanged his miter for a zucchetto and stood to perform the Liturgy of the Eucharist-following the same sequence followed by most every other priest, everywhere...
...All 125,000 of us-not least the pope-had things to do, places to be...
...Mail carriers toted their sacks from door to door...
...It had been a day to remember, yet it was just another in the length of days unfolding-the Saturday of the Twenty-sixth Week in Ordinary Time...
...The familiarity of the rite could be felt in the crowd as well...
...Ticket holders had been told to arrive at dawn, but I woke after seven in my apartment not far from Central Park, had a leisurely cup of coffee, and stopped to get a bagel on my way to the subway...
...To one side stood a couple straight from the J. Crew Catalog...
...A teen-age boy in a green T-shirt kissed his hand and thrust it heavenward...
...I would have to enter at 82nd and Central Park West...
...Paul Elie is a frequent Commonweal contributor...
...The unity of the church in the liturgy-often thought to have been lost with the Latin Mass-was palpable...
...I said good-by to Claudia and I walked up Broadway, as I'd done on countless Saturday mornings...
...Claudia was from ABC News, but she was there for herself...
...the preponderance of young people, and the congregants' casual fluency in American culture...
...Crowds were still streaming in: red-ticket holders this way, white that way, and Credentials to the Delacorte Theater, near the altar...
...You might not have known it from the media coverage of the pope's visit, which focused on how giant the portable altars were, how vast the crowds, how snarled the traffic wherever the pope went...
...The orderliness of the crowd's exit was notable, but even more so was the swiftness-walking toward Central Park West, Claudia and I trailed a French horn player who had performed the "Hallelujah Chorus" postlude just moments earlier...
...piety aside, he might have been a skateboard youth...
...It had been a good morning...
...As it happened, we were in the right place at the right time...
...We gamboled toward the precinct house...
...were manifest around us, body and soul: the mix of whites, blacks, and Hispanics...
...It was half past twelve...
...Then the Mass was over, and we went in peace...
...It was not an anticipatory Sunday Mass but a Saturday Mass, with just two readings...
...Fifteen minutes later I was in the park...
...It was nearly nine, the time the pope would arrive...
...We shrugged and shook hands...
Vol. 122 • November 1995 • No. 20
