REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Pope’s Trip: Never by the Numbers

Numerologists confounded, The Case of an Ambiguous Kiss, echoes of a “Pope” named Allen and a Bali low: moments for nonecclesiastical reflection Saturday as a road-weary papal caravan called at this Indian Ocean way-station on the final stop of a grueling Asian odyssey.

Pope John Paul II came to preach for strong families and strict moralities on this tourists-and-sugar island after six days in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation. There, on the storied isle of Sumatra, the 300 voices of one choir that kept a melodious appointment at the Pope’s Mass for 100,000 Catholics were all Protestants.

If the bizarre intruded on a 24,660-mile trip of 11 days across eight time zones during which a 69-year-old Pope will have made 28 speeches and logged 54 flying hours by the time he gets back to Rome on Monday, numbers do not appear to have been a factor.

As the Pope arrived in Seoul last week to begin his trip, numerologists told Asian newspapers that they were worried about his prospects. For superstitious Chinese and Koreans, they noted, 4 is the unluckiest number. So much so that in some hotels and office buildings the floor numbers jump from 3 to 5.

Yet the Pope launched his 44th foreign trip, his fourth to Asia, to address the 44th Eucharistic Congress with a 44-hour visit to South Korea in the 44th year of its independence. With nary a glitch.

John Paul may have become the world’s best-known practitioner of the symbolic kiss. Photos of the white-robed Pope on bended knee kissing the ground on arrival in a new country have been fixtures of papal visits from Bolivia to Botswana. One kiss per country.

In Indonesia, though, the papal kiss became less a gesture of humility than a matter of state.

The kiss in Jakarta was crisply routine, although the tarmac was wet from a shower.

Whether the Pope would make the same gesture again when he arrived in East Timor, the most important stop on his tour, became a burning political issue. Clustered in the shade of scrawny coconut palms from 100-degree temperatures, two dozen reporters waited, parboiled, at the East Timor airport to find out.

Indonesia invaded East Timor, a Portuguese colonial possession for 450 years, and annexed it in 1976. Nearly a third of the population--up to 200,000 people--have died violently since then in the territory Indonesia now administers as its 27th province.

Portugal does not recognize Indonesian administration and neither, following the lead of the United Nations, does the Vatican.

To have kissed the ground at the East Timor airport would have insulted Indonesia by saying implicitly that John Paul considered that he had entered a new country.

The Pope didn’t do so, thereby adding injury to a perceived insult announced by Portugal from the instant an East Timor visit was first announced. The Pope’s failure to kiss is “recognition of East Timor as part of Indonesia. No doubt about it,” crowed a Jakarta newspaper.

But wait! At his Mass in Dili, the East Timor capital, John Paul knelt with great deliberation and kissed a crucifix laid on a cushion on the ground. Timorese patriots among the 100,000 faithful cheered. Did it mean that with his gesture that the Pope was in fact acknowledging that Portugal. . . ?

But even as the Pope celebrated Mass, his spokesman circulated among reporters to explain that the kiss was not a kiss. Rather, he explained, it was the customary gesture of a bishop entering his diocese.

Nothing, then, had happened after all. Except that Vatican specialists used to such things concluded that the explanation had not originated with the spokesman at all but with the Vatican secretary of state as his attempt to avoid giving diplomatic offense.

In teeming Jakarta, springboard for exhausting Papal expeditions to the exotic Indonesian hinterland, John Paul became the Pope most often seen by Indonesians. Even so, he is not the one who has most practical importance on the daily life of a metropolis of 9 million.

In 1958, some Jakartans still remember, the United States was underwriting a guerrilla war against Moscow-ally President Sukarno, first leader of an independent Indonesia. One Sunday morning, a CIA contract pilot was shot down after mistakenly bombing a church.

His name was Allen Pope, and he languished four years in jail. He was released about the time Jakarta got its first freeway--built by the United States. John Paul’s Jakarta motorcade last week compounded the traffic snarl along what is still whimsically known there as the “Pope Highway.”

In Indonesia, or any of the other dozen or so countries he visits each year, John Paul travels many roads. All of them are serious.

He says he is a missionary following Jesus’ injunction to preach to all nations, and he trolls for souls morning until night.

Rarely is it apparent to his faithful that the Pope suffers the jet lag, the heat and the fatigue that afflicts his retinue. After one Mass in incredible heat at a soccer stadium on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, a ringing-wet John Paul was forced to change every stitch of clothing before continuing his tour.

No tourist, this Pope.

He said one Mass last week in the city of Jogjakarta without even a nod toward an ancient Hindu temple or the 8th-Century Buddhist temple of Borobudor, two landmarks of Indonesian cultural history less than an hour away.

Twice, the Pope overflew the island of Bali that draws vacationers from all over the world. Vatican reporters in his train were less fortunate. Twice, their smaller plane landed in Bali to refuel. Neither time was anybody allowed to get out.