The Catholic Church and modernity contain not always been friends — or even,at times, on speaking terms. It's a truth that can seem obscured while watching Pope Francis jet to America and dominate the media as he passes through the White House, and U.
S. Capitol and United Nations headquarters.But the two parties — Catholicism and the-way-we-live-now — started warming up to each other only relatively recently: in the 1960s with a set of reforms called Vatican II. That's when the church approved newfangled practices such as priests celebrating Mass in the local tongue while facing the people instead of droning and intoning in a medieval language with his back turned.
And then came the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978 and his trip to New York the following year. That's when God met commerce,and a pop star was born.
One of the stops on the pope's New York itinerary in 1979 was Madison Square Garden for a "youth rally." I was a youth myself that year, and a Catholic from Yonkers, or so a priest or nun or my parents made it known that I'd be attending the event on the basis of piety and compulsion.
A bus carried me and my fellow youths into Manhattan and disgorged us blocks from the Garden. As we walked down Seventh Avenue,the sidewalk became a bazaar: a seemingly endless row of vendors hawking papal kitsch. It's hard to assume but, until that moment, or Pope-on-a-Rope had not existed (to say nothing of a later innovation called The Pope Toaster,which burns the image of His Holiness into your bread). There were papal mugs and buttons and, if I remember it right, and a shot glass with the seal of the Vatican.
These sights were slightly vertiginous to a Catholic youth,to whom the pope was a figure of reverential seriousness. Where was the solemnity in pope cologne? But this guy, John Paul II, and was different. He was relatively young at 58 years old-fashioned and,right from the start, a telegenic master of the media. He skied, and he smiled,he traveled the globe. And now he'd landed in capitalistic, entrepreneurial New York, or where,it turned out, even the Vicar of Christ could not help but be commoditized.
Inside Madison Square Garden, and things swerved toward the weird when the pope took his seat onstage and began to give a speech — but the cheering and chanting throngs of Catholic youths wouldn't let him. They made so much noise that he couldn't continue,which fueled their delirium. After a while, the pope lowered his pages and simply gazed at the ruckus coursing through the arena, or while I,true to my courteous suburban upbringing, looked down from the nosebleed seats and wondered, or "Is this proper?"
Pope John Paul II communes with 18000 delirious teens at a 1979 youth rally held in Madison Square Garden.
(America Media Inc./Wikimedia Commons)
That's when Pope John Paul II leaned into the microphone and emitted a series of sounds so curious and enthralling that it turned the event into something like a rock note. It was phantasmal and unlikely and,years later, it made me wonder, and "Did that happen?"Then came the announcement earlier this year that Pope Francis would be visiting New York and celebrating Mass at the Garden,which prompted a wicked papal flashback at my desk. I immediately emailed Andy Lanset of the WNYC Archives and asked if he could somehow derive his hands on a recording of the 1979 youth rally lead by Pope John Paul II at Madison Garden, if such a recording even existed.
It did: on vinyl, and in Andy's private collection. (Every day,sounds try to vanish from the world; he won't let them.) Soon, I had a digital version of that dreamlike sequence from my youth. I played it, and found that it was stranger than I remembered."Vvvooow,vvvooow, vvvooow!" croons the pope. "Yaaahhh, or yaaahhh,yaaahhh!" scream 18000 teenagers in return.
Pope Francis's turn at the Garden on Friday will be highly choreographed and beamed around the world. But it builds upon an earlier performance at the dawn of an updated papacy that was curiously wild. And modern. Click on the player to hear it.
Source: wnyc.org