Reporter’s Notebook : Rosary Demand Exceeds Supply on Pontiff’s Tour

When Pope John Paul II travels to such faraway places as this dust-blown desert city where he preached Monday, getting all the papal paraphernalia to the church on time can be a daunting logistical challenge.

Usually, the pontiff’s aides, lugging nondescript but important brown-and-black-leather suitcases, see to it that changes of vestments and other essentials fly with him on whatever aircraft has been assigned as the papal plane.

But as departure time for Piura approached, at least one papal aide suffered a severe case of anxiety.

One member of the entourage usually is assigned to hand out small papal gifts, which, when blessed by John Paul, become treasured possessions of those of his far-flung flock lucky enough to receive them. But on Monday, the designated aide had run out of rosaries.

The rosary supply actually began to run short in Quito, Ecuador, last week. It triggered an urgent request to Vatican City, via the Italian airline Alitalia, to rush an emergency supply to Lima, Peru, by Monday, when it was evident there would be no gift rosaries left.

Anxiety mounted as the papal plane, a Peruvian air force Fokker F-28 transport, was readied for flight. But, almost at the last moment, the emergency shipment of rosaries arrived, a large enough supply to meet papal gift-giving needs until he returns to Rome on Wednesday.

Some of the Pope’s faithful are not content merely to meet the leader of the world’s 795 million Roman Catholics and receive a gift medal or rosary from him. In Quito last Tuesday, Ecuadorean President Leon Febres Cordero and his elegantly coiffed, mink-clad wife formally greeted John Paul, then paused for a moment to chat with him informally.

Unbeknownst to the first couple and the pontiff, television cameras and live microphones were still trained on them as they chatted, and the following brief dialogue in Spanish between the Pope and the first lady was broadcast nationwide:

First Lady: “Will you baptize my grandson?”

Pope: “You mean now?”

First Lady: “Well, yes.”

Pope: “But you need a church . . . you need to make plans.”

At that point, the president seemed to notice the cameras. With a tug on the elegant sleeve of the mink coat, he drew the first lady away.

The Pope appeared twice in the ultramodern Teresa Carreno Theater in Caracas, Venezuela, to address religious groups. On both occasions, he was swept grandly up from the ground floor to the theater entrance by escalator and was seen to carefully hike up the flowing hem of his full-length white cassock.

The reason for the special care became evident when reporters noticed that John Paul’s official press spokesman, Msgr. Pierfranco Pastore, had shredded the hem of his own brand-new cassock during a trial run on the same escalator.

The monsignor, newly promoted and more accustomed to wearing ordinary priestly suits with pants than a flowing cassock, got it caught and couldn’t pull it loose. A rescuer stopped the moving stairs, but the cassock still remained firmly pinched. Finally, the escalator was reversed, freeing the torn garment but sending Pastore into an unceremonious but harmless pratfall.

The people who come to see the Pope during his international pilgrimages, even in mobs of hundreds of thousands, tend to behave piously, as if they were in church.

But thieves and pickpockets often seek benefits from the pontiff’s visits, too.

At the Cathedral of San Francisco in Quito, a United Press International reporter, one of the regular Vatican traveling press corps, was hemmed in too tightly by the crowd even to see her assailant’s face when an unwanted hand thrust into her trenchcoat pocket and removed her passport and wallet containing $1,450.

At the hotel where the Vatican entourage stayed--one of Quito’s best--Alitalia’s senior representative on the papal trip put down his suitcase for a few minutes and returned to find that someone had opened it and stolen all his suits.

The Vatican correspondent of the Madrid daily El Pais was also unlucky. Thieves entered his room in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and took everything, leaving him uncomfortably clad in the same shirt, sweater and slacks for the rest of the 12-day trip.

On Sunday, when the Pope visited Ayacucho, Peru, in an area that is the center of a violent Marxist insurgency, he was overcome by emotion.

When he ended a speech with a blessing in Quechua, the tongue of the Andes Indians, some in the crowd wept.

The Pope’s own poise shattered as he left the speaker’s platform and saw peasants and children waiting below with handmade gifts for him, according to Bishop Juan Jose Larraneta, who was standing a few feet away.

“The Pope is a strong man who does not cry easily. But when he saw the poor people waiting with their gifts, his eyes grew red and the tears ran down his cheeks,” said Larraneta, who is bishop of Puerto Maldonado in the Peruvian jungle. “Perhaps the Pope was thinking that he had come and was leaving, but these people were staying and that poverty and violence would remain here among them.”