THE PAPAL VISIT : Thousands in L.A. Toil for a Once-Only Visit by the Pontiff

In the room where Pope John Paul II will sleep in Los Angeles, the rugs have been shampooed and the curtains cleaned, and a small refrigerator will be stocked with fruit juices and sodas.

The vestments he will wear at the Dodger Stadium Mass have been pressed, the chairs he will sit in at religious events have been reupholstered, and the kneelers he will kneel on have been emblazoned with the papal coat of arms. Even the flowers on the altar of St. Vibiana’s Cathedral where he will pray have been reinforced with wire so no blossom droops.

For the last several days, thousands of Southern Californians have been hurriedly and nervously completing similar preparations launched, in some cases, nearly a year ago. The Pope’s plane, “Shepherd One,” touches down at Los Angeles International Airport at 9:55 a.m. Tuesday, commencing a 48-hour stay in Los Angeles.

Almost everyone who will participate in a papal event is diligenting rehearsing. A San Pedro man whose white racing pigeons will be released at the Coliseum Mass to symbolize doves of peace takes the birds out every evening for a short flight to get them in shape.

‘An Honor’

“I feel it’s an honor,” said Patrick Joseph Evangelista, 33, a truck driver who raises the birds on the side and rents them out for ceremonial events. “Not everyone can contribute their birds to the Pope.”

Milagros Tobar, 38, a clerk who works two jobs to support her two children, will be part of a Mexican folk dance troupe that will perform at the Universal Amphitheater, where the Pope will meet with young Catholics. She has never been so punctual about practice.

“Even when I work all day, 15 hours a day, I come straight here after work,” said Tobar, breaking from rehearsal on a warm evening last week at a San Fernando recreation hall.

At St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood, 20 young boys in the Paulist Choristers have been practicing daily to sing before 100,000 people at the Coliseum, where the Pope will say Mass. In a small schoolroom last week, the boys, clad in T-shirts and shorts, stood tall and straight in front of blue plastic chairs, while director Jon Wattenbarger led them through exercises.

“Make sure you get an ah, ah sound, not an uh, uh, sound,” he admonished at one point. Several boys did solos, hoping to be chosen by Wattenbarger as soloist at the Coliseum.

Rehearsed His Delivery

Ramiro Galvan, 25, a construction worker, will present John Paul with the hosts for Communion at the Coliseum, an opportunity he owes to a priest friend involved in the planning. Galvan has rehearsed his delivery and fantasized about what he will say should the pontiff speak to him during the heady face-to-face meeting.

“I will tell him I love him; I respect him,” said Galvan, beaming.

In a downtown building that until recently was a convent, papal planners who work for the Los Angeles archdiocese have been toiling into the night. For the last three weeks, planners have been training thousands of volunteers who will escort bishops, guide priests to their assigned spots for Communion at the huge Masses and assist with crowd control at the motorcade.

The logistics that must be mastered are stunning: 750 priests at the Coliseum must be positioned so they can serve Communion to more than 100,000 worshipers in 18 minutes; more than 300 vehicles must move 800 people to different papal events on schedule; two sports stadiums must be transformed into outdoor cathedrals and then transformed back into playing fields.

Every contingency, including the weather, must be anticipated. Traveling with the papal party in Los Angeles will be 49 yellow umbrellas for the papal entourage and one big white umbrella for the Pope.

Walter McGuire, a former political advance man for the Carter Administration who now runs a San Francisco public affairs firm, spearheads the archdiocese’s planning. He said one of his aims is to make the visit as economical as possible, and he expects the Los Angeles visit will cost the church $2.5 million. By comparison, he said, the much shorter papal visit to San Francisco will cost that archdiocese about $3 million.

“Right now, everything is launched,” said McGuire, 42. “It’s just like you fire a thousand missiles off . . . and now the important thing is to make sure that people don’t get in each other’s way.”

In Long Beach, 13 nuns, members of the Carmel of St. Joseph cloistered order, have spent the last several weeks packaging 112,000 whole wheat Communion wafers into 640 plastic envelopes for Communion at the Coliseum. “It’s pretty tedious,” admitted Sister Veronica Arakaki, who along with the other nuns leaves the monastery only for medical emergencies or to go the bank.

Martinez & Murphey Inc., a Los Angeles company that makes liturgical garments, has designed and sewn the vestments the bishops will wear at the Dodger Stadium Mass. On a recent afternoon, everyone from seamstresses to secretaries in the downtown warehouse were busy ironing 350 red chasubles for the bishops. A red silk vestment for the Pope lay on a table by itself.

Each of the bishops’ sizes had to be obtained months in advance. The longest chasuble will go to Bishop Francis Shea of Evansville, Ill., who is 6 feet, 6 inches tall, and the shortest to Bishop Raymundo Pena from El Paso, Tex., who is 5 feet, 2 inches. The firm has designed about 70 extras in different sizes as a contingency measure.

The Pope will stay at the rectory of St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles, where a steady stream of passers-by have dropped off notes and pictures for him. Everything at the rectory has been scrubbed and polished, and there has been a “purging” of ugly furniture and accumulated junk, said David Sutton, the receptionist at the cathedral. John Paul will sleep in the “adequate but by no means ostentatious” upper-floor apartment of Archbishop Roger Mahony, Sutton said. The views from his bedroom windows will be of parking lots and warehouses.

The downtown Los Angeles Hilton Hotel will provide the linen, housekeeping staff and flowers and fruit baskets for the rooms, Sutton said, and there are accommodations for the Pope’s valet. Sutton said the staff has already been apprised of the Pope’s preferences.

“He likes to eat a big breakfast. He doesn’t like spices, and he likes a light dinner,” Sutton said.

For private prayer, the Pope will use the rectory chapel, where the wood paneling has been oiled and a new, ornate tapestry hung.

“We’ll never reach the point when we’re ready for the Pope,” Sutton said. “We’re doing everything we can that is humanly possible. But we could still be preparing another six months, and we still would be finding dust and chips.”

Parishes throughout Southern California have chartered buses, leased vans or planned car pools to get to the papal events, and some are adding papal decorations to their churches.

On Thursday, when the Pope arrived in Miami, St. Genevieve’s parish in Panorama City raised a yellow and white papal flag and an American flag and installed floodlights beneath them. The closest the Holy Father will get to St. Genevieve’s during his tour will be when he flies over it in a helicopter on his way to a Wednesday morning meeting with U.S. Catholic bishops at the San Fernando Mission. But that’s close enough.

“They’ll (the flags) be up there day and night. On Roscoe Boulevard, we’re doing our thing to welcome the Holy Father,” said Mgsr. John Cosgrove, the pastor.

At St. Bede Church in La Canada, parishioners on Sunday prayed for a successful papal visit, sang a papal hymn called “Long Live the Pope” and purchased yellow and white papal flags ($2) and buttons with the face of John Paul ($1) to take to Tuesday’s motorcade.

For businesses along the motorcade route, the visit apparently is a mixed blessing.

Gus Aguilar’s shop, Haydee’s Fashion, is located directly on the pontiff’s parade route up Broadway, but he figures that the crowds will include more browsers than buyers and he intends to close for the day Tuesday.

“It would be nice to think that women coming to see the Pope might go shopping for a dress afterward, but realistically the only thing they will want inside this shop on Tuesday will be air conditioning,” he told a reporter.

But the McDonald’s restaurant not far away plans to bring in all 40 employees, plus three security officers, at 5 a.m. Tuesday in anticipation of the sale of a lot of Egg McMuffins.

“People gotta eat,” manager Ralph Diaz explained.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Cathleen Decker, David DeVoss, David Freed, Kathy Hendrix, John Henken, Patt Morrison, Ted Vollmer and Boris Yaro.