Security Fears, Disputes Waylay Plans for Pope’s S.F. Parade, Visit to AIDS Hospice

Tentative plans here for Pope John Paul II to travel through the downtown streets in a parade and to visit an AIDS hospice have been put on hold because of security fears and a hot debate that has split Catholics in the Bay Area, organizers for the papal trip said Thursday.

When word leaked out earlier this week that the Pope might stop at the 15-bed Coming Home Hospice in an overwhelmingly gay district of the city during his 22-hour visit on Sept. 17 and 18, leaders of some homosexual groups criticized the idea as a “public relations stunt” and said gay activists might protest outside the hospice.

“A public relations stunt is the last thing we’d want to do,” Father Miles Riley of the Archdiocese of San Francisco said during a press conference Thursday at St. Mary’s Cathedral. “Our desire was to focus on healing, hope and a remedy--not accelerate the hysteria.”

Agitation over the Pope’s plans to visit San Francisco has risen within the city’s large homosexual community since the Vatican issued a statement last October describing homosexual behavior as “on objective disorder” and “an intrinsic moral evil.”

Riley said national planners of the Pope’s 10-day U.S. trip had left the proposed visit to AIDS patients off the San Francisco itinerary “primarily because there isn’t time” on his schedule. “But hopefully, that could change.”

At the same time, however, national organizers this week approved a new stop on the Pope’s San Francisco itinerary--a brief ceremony to bless the Golden Gate Bridge, which is observing its 50th anniversary this May.

Russell Shaw, spokesman for the national office of the Catholic Church in Washington, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that it was “still an open question, which will be referred to Rome” whether the Pope’s final itinerary might still include the hospice, which will open next week in a former convent leased from Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church.

“I think they’re floating trial balloons,” said John Wahl, coordinator of the primarily gay Papal Visit Task Force, which plans to demonstrate peacefully when the Pope visits here. “They are finding the depth of our anger and are reacting with some concern, which well they might.”

Riley said earlier plans for the pontiff to cover a two- to three-mile downtown parade route that included Market Street have now been scrapped by the Secret Service because of security problems posed by high-rise buildings along the proposed route. But the Pope will still travel in his bulletproof “Popemobile” “at some points within the city,” Riley added.

Asked if threatened demonstrations caused the decision to drop the extended motorcade, Riley said that the Secret Service “takes every threat very seriously. I’m hoping a lot of them (threats) are only emotion and rhetoric. . . . I’m hoping bridges can be built between now and when he comes.”