Profile : The Pope Nobody Knows

And now the motorcade turns onto the broad, sunlit avenue . . . white-robed John Paul, standing behind the bulletproof shield . . . a ring of motorcycles and armored limousines shepherding the Popemobile . . . look, the Pope is smiling, waving at the young mother holding up her baby . . . extra police to handle the crowd . . . pressing against the barricades, cheering, clapping . . . a forest of yellow and white flags . . . the procession heading for the cathedral where the Pope . . . .

That was Brasilia. Or Los Angeles. Or, this week, the Angolan capital of Luanda. You have to be a hermit to have missed a morning like it. Any continent.

History’s most extraordinary and well-documented passage of rites has scoured streets and souls in 103 countries; Angola, starting Thursday, is 104.

His Holiness John Paul II, Pontifex Maximus , successor to St. Peter, bishop of Rome, is the widest-traveled Pope in 2,000 years and maybe the most recognized man in the world. For 13 years he has flourished on a grinding travel schedule of the sort that has exhausted George Bush in four. He is the undisputed, rule-till-death leader of 919 million Roman Catholics, and, effectively, global high priest. He is a figure of infinite familiarity.

Everybody knows the Pope.

Wrong.

. . . cobblestones coldly aching in the wan sunlight of a winter morning . . . in the enclosed courtyard two dark sedans, unmarked, Rome license plates, no Vatican insignia . . . two or three security guards, dressed for the country . . . they are excited, they are tense . . . and they are lonely . . . a stooped figure in makeshift ski clothes that no designer would sign . . . a pair of sunglasses . . . a spring to his step . . . cars nosing tentatively into the tangle of city traffic . . . no sirens, no ceremony, no crowds . . . a brief, blessed anonymity . . . .

This, too, is a right of papal passage. The Pope nobody knows is away to ski secretly for a few hours, away from the Vatican that is his home, his office--and his prison.

Free at last.

Sometimes it’s easier to see the vestments than the priest. Since his election in 1978, Karol Wojtyla has been on the road more than 1,000 days, journeying miles enough to have been to the moon and back.

Yet he has spent more than three times that many days in the Vatican, locked inside two floors of the Renaissance palazzo where he prays, he thinks, he rules. And where he is sometimes restively ruled by the constraints of his role as spiritual leader and chairman of a gigantic institution. If it is the traveling Pope that the world knows best, it is the Vatican Pope that history will best remember.

True, for John Paul life in the Vatican cocoon triggers less adrenaline than preaching on the road. Often the Pope seems drawn and tired when he launches a long trip abroad--three of them this year, 55 in his reign, including this week’s Angola visit with a stop in Sao Tome e Principe.

Yet on the return flight, the papal airplane is invariably divided into three unequal parts: a clerical retinue stumbling in exhaustion; numbed reporters for whom the city of Ziguinchor (Senegal), has faded into Banjul (Gambia), has fuzzed into Conakry (Guinea); and a relaxed, buoyant and seemingly rested Pope.

The foreign trips, plus the 103 he has made within Italy, transcend high-visibility glamour and grit. John Paul believes that bishops must teach and that pastors must visit their flocks. Yet it is here, behind the imposing walls of a city-state in the heart of Rome, that the Pope spends the time that is most important to the church he heads.

Here, as head of state and head of church--pastor and president--he formulates the policies and names the men who will oversee the legacy of his remarkable reign deep into the next century. There are more than 2,300 diocesan bishops around the world, and each one of them is obliged to make an ad limina visit to the Vatican every five years. John Paul sees them all, hearing endless tales of grass-roots trials and triumphs, gauging the men who recount them.

The private working life of John Paul II in the Vatican is rigid, tightly woven and a constrictive counterpoint to his global pilgrimages. At home, the Pope is a disciplined, utterly engrossed work-Catholic of unswerving conviction and unflagging intensity. Yet he is also a man whose simple tastes and austere lifestyle are spiced by a sweet tooth and the insatiable craving for companionship--and fresh air. Says one of John Paul’s aides: “Seeing the Holy Father enveloped in the Vatican is like watching an eagle in a cage.”

For John Paul, the homework never stops. He surrenders to it with enormous energy, compartmentalizing his day into never-waste-a-second segments. Karol Wojtyla is an intellectual who has learned to manage, to innovate and to command.

His church is not only the oldest institution in the Western World; it also has an unabashed tradition of one-man rule. Leadership is a mantle John Paul has come to wear in all seasons. He is the avuncular figure of great humanity who cuddles babies on visits to parish churches. And he is the boss who one night braced a roomful of Roman theologians, a drill sergeant policing his church’s best and brightest thinkers.

“He told us that there were two kinds of theology,” recalls an Italian priest who was present and ever since has had no great fondness for his Pope. “There was Catholic theology, which implies responsibility to a community and a tradition. And there was another theology relying on more independent-minded thinking. He wasn’t having any of Brand X.”

Such off-camera snippets in the Vatican life of 72-year-old Pope John Paul II in the 14th year of his reign are not the stuff of Vatican communiques. Papal aides are chary folk. Still, from sources close to the papal household and the public record, it is possible to piece together a portrait of a Pope his people seldom see.

The picture shows that Karol Wojtyla, formerly bishop of Krakow, Poland, now bishop of Rome, has left an indelible stamp on the papacy--in style as well as content. And that he himself has been marked indelibly by a calling that, in a 1978 puff of white smoke, instantly cut him off, at age 58, from his home, his country, his friends and a lifestyle one universe removed from the strictures of Vatican life.

Home in Poland, Wojtyla went for a walk in the country with friends every Wednesday afternoon. That has transmuted now into a week each summer spent walking in the mountains of northern Italy. There the Pope lives in a rented house too small to accommodate even the handful of aides and police officers who accompany him from Rome and on daily hikes of up to six hours.

A few years ago in an Alpine village, Italian reporter Bruno Bartoloni asked the vacationing Pope if he prefers life “in the Alps or in prison at the Vatican.” The Pope, mountains all around him, laughed: “One must know that prison to appreciate this freedom,” he replied.

Karol Wojtyla has been a priest for 45 early-rising years. In his stay-at-home months, he gets up without an alarm clock in his corner fourth floor apartment in the Apostolic Palace that angles off the right-hand side of St. Peter’s Square. Adjoining is the office-study with the bulletproof window from which he greets pilgrims most Sundays. Around 6:00, John Paul begins a long day of structured variety: religion, administration, comradeship--and a brief private fling away from them all.

He is a man of prayer, and that is how he starts every day; what John Paul wryly calls his “audience with God,” an hour-long private devotion in a 46-seat chapel next to his apartment. At 7 a.m., the Pope says Mass in the chapel, sometimes joined by visiting bishops or lay visitors.

The congregation changes every day. Philippine President Cory Aquino went one morning at her own urgent request, and Mother Teresa was a recent visitor. But many guests are everyday Catholics: a couple from Buenos Aires and their 10 children; Peter Glasgow, a retired airline mechanic from Detroit, and his wife Sophie, priest-son Dennis and daughter Pamela, then 28.

“I wrote asking for an invitation. To my surprise, my parents were invited on the first day of their first visit to Rome,” recalls Father Dennis Glasgow, who is studying at a pontifical university here. “My mother had recently broken her knee and was not walking well. We were nervous, afraid of being late, but one of the Swiss Guards told her: ‘Don’t worry, the Pope won’t start without you.’

“And when we got to the chapel we were astonished to see that he was already there, kneeling in prayer, alone. After Mass he greeted us affably and kissed my sister. Pamela has Down’s Syndrome and doesn’t speak easily, but when you ask her about it she says ‘Pope’ and makes three kissing sounds.”

The manager Pope takes over from the pastor at an after-Mass breakfast, the start of John Paul’s executive working day and one of those behind-the-scenes changes that has obliterated centuries of Vatican tradition.

Italians sometimes boast that Pope John XXIII, beloved, big-bellied Papa Giovanni, not only doted on Parmesan cheese but also knew from which cave near Parma he liked it best. John Paul is a Pole. Food is fuel, not ceremony. Ideas and information excite him more than calories could.

He has nonplussed the traditionalist Vatican by introducing the power breakfast, the working lunch and the still-working dinner. John Paul astonished dinner guests not long ago by affectionately slapping the dining table he shares with a constantly shifting cast of visitors. “This has contributed greatly to my Petrine ministry,” the successor of Peter proclaimed.

Pope Pius XII always ate alone. John XXIII lunched with his secretary, and so did Paul VI, although he sometimes invited friends on special occasions. John Paul never eats alone. More, he is resolutely catholic in his choice of companions. For the first of his day’s three working meals, he breakfasts with anybody it occurs to him to invite after Mass. The only fixtures are his two personal secretaries, Polish Msgr. Stanislao Dziwisz, 52, who became Karol Wojtyla’s aide in 1966, and Msgr. Vincent Tan Ngoc Thu, a 72-year-old Vietnamese.

The food is plain, prepared by the same handful of Polish nuns who were Wojtyla’s housekeepers in Krakow: coffee, crusty bread and jam, fruit. The milk is fresh: The Vatican has a small dairy near the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo where the cows are well-nurtured and caretakers delicately skirt the question of whether there is a papal bull.

Prayer. Ceremony. Acquisition of information. Management. Reflection. Individually and as a blend, they are John Paul’s life inside Vatican walls.

Each day of his vigorous papacy is mapped out before most of Rome has sipped through an eye-opening cappuccino . By the time the daily papal ritual ends, post-dinner crowds are forming outside Roman discos.

Like most people, the Pope goes to the office every morning, although few of his followers have as easy a commute. It’s only a few paces, and he probably wishes it were longer, or at least more varied. The 16th-Century walls are close around him.

The manager Pope works alone and undisturbed, about five hours of paperwork each day. His private phone rings only if a world leader is on the other end. If John Paul places a call, it is usually to family or sick friends.

Methodically, he wades through the bulky contents of dark leather dispatch cases assembled by the Curia. Much of the paperwork would be dealt with by underlings in most governments, according to one aide. The dross is the price of the Vatican’s super-centralized organization and John Paul’s simultaneous roles as a temporal and a spiritual leader.

He is the single focus of all that happens at the Vatican. While some of the Pope’s men bring him work, a fair number try to cosset him in ways that might have better pleased his predecessors. In the Alban hills each summer, tomatoes grow from seeds sent by a pious well-wisher from Poland. “Absurd,” mutters a gardener monk who sometimes grudgingly waters the putative papal patch.

Inside the Vatican, the papal inner circle is small. Only a few key officials have regular access to his office. They are all John Paul’s personal appointees, all fiercely loyal, as international as their church. Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, 64, effectively the Vatican prime minister, is Italian. So is Archbishop Giovanni Battista Re, 58, the chief of staff who coordinates the Pope’s office work. Foreign Minister Jean-Louis Tauran, 49, is a French archbishop. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 65, the keeper of orthodoxy, is German. Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, 70, who hails from Benin, is the highest ranking African in the church and is responsible for appointing new bishops. Spaniard Joaquin Navarro, 55, head of the Vatican press office and a close papal adviser, is the sole layman.

Like John Paul himself, the Vatican aides are polyglot. Latin is the official written tongue, but the working language is Italian. John Paul himself writes only in Polish but speaks half a dozen languages and reads as many. His Vatican life, in fact, is a linguistic tour de force .

In one typically kaleidoscopic week last fall, the Pope received bishops from Sicily, India, Byelorussia (now Belarus) and Canada. He spoke with the presidents of Egypt, Lithuania and Bolivia, met with ambassadors from Costa Rica, Thailand and Algeria and chatted with the mayor of Moscow. He spoke French with the secretary general of the United Nations, Spanish with the queen of Spain and English with two senior U.S. officials.

Late every morning, John Paul descends one flight in a small elevator to embark on a round of private “audiences”--Vatican-speak for papal meetings. An invitation to a private audience with the Pope is probably more prized than the most prized theater ticket in the world.

“About half the senior administration officials who come through Rome for conferences and such . . . what they really want is to meet the Pope,” said one American diplomat.

At audiences arranged by Bishop Dino Monduzzi, a 69-year-old Italian who heads the papal household, John Paul routinely receives heads of state and foreign dignitaries, his visiting bishops, ambassadors accredited to the Vatican and groups of pilgrims who are lucky or have powerful church connections.

A private audience can be a quick “Good morning” with photographers snapping in a baroque salon or a serious tete-a-tete across a polished wooden table in a papal library dominated by two 16th-Century bookcases and Perugino’s “Resurrection.” George Bush and Boris Yeltsin were library visitors on different days last December.

Aides who brief him say John Paul is a quick study, readily absorbing information and ideas. His capacity for work seems boundless; he makes no concession to age.

“This life is much more tranquil than the one I led in Krakow. Sometimes it occurs to me that it’s too routine, because the Pope always stays at home . . . but I’ve introduced lots of changes,” John Paul once told Italian reporter Orazio Petrosillo.

To meet with everyday Catholics, John Paul hosts a Wednesday general audience, sometimes in St. Peter’s Square but often in a 7,000-seat auditorium at the Vatican. There, in one typical audience, he greeted groups of Italian nuns, pilgrims from around the world, executives of a hotel chain, a group of Lutherans from Hellerup, Denmark, 30 members of the U.S. armed forces, 25 students and teachers from Palos Verdes High School and 57 members of the choir from St. Lawrence Church in Alexandria, Va. They sang.

One of the few uncertainties about the Pope’s Vatican routine, his aides sometimes say, is what time he will turn up for lunch and how many guests he will bring. Lunch, keeping Roman hours, usually begins between 1:30 and 2 and is the big meal of the day at the Apostolic Palace.

The Pope’s guests, invited by his personal secretaries, might be church officials summoned for a specific discussion, but they could also be economists, poets, newspaper editors--or just old friends. On the day he was shot in 1981, the Pope lunched with a professor of genetics from the Sorbonne.

For lunch, the Polish nuns serve John Paul pasta--with a strong Polish accent--and meat ‘n’ potatoes as a main course. A different white wine graces the papal table nearly every day, according to one frequent papal lunch companion: “Someone will say, ‘The So-and-so cooperative near Turin has sent us some wine,’ and the Pope will say, ‘Let’s try it.’ ”

Dessert is also a windfall event, the Pope’s guest says. “Someone will say, ‘The good sisters at the St. Somebody monastery have baked us this tart. . . .’ ”

The Pope likes dessert. One day, there were soon-vanished mangoes, courtesy of a bishop in Togo. An ambitious Brazilian prelate uses a crate of papayas to announce his arrival in Rome. His Holiness has scant resistance to papayas.

“I think that John Paul has humanized the figure of the Pope at home,” said Petrosillo, Vatican specialist for the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero. Pius XII, he observes, intimidated people with his court-like attitude. John XXIII was genial but maintained ecclesiastical pomp and circumstance. Paul VI, from whom Wojtyla took the last half of his papal name, modernized and lightened the atmosphere of the Apostolic Palace.

Wojtyla, by contrast, shows little interest in trappings. He prefers people. Leaving a public audience one recent morning, John Paul stopped to pose for pictures with a group of Polish pilgrims. A nun feverishly kissed his ring in time to the camera flashes. Instead of pulling his hand away, the Pope tweaked her nose. She blushed scarlet. He grinned broadly.

“What is remarkable about John Paul is how many people he sees. Every day but Sunday, at every meal, he meets people from different countries and walks of life,” noted Petrosillo.

Navarro, the Pope’s spokesman, remembers once accompanying the Beijing correspondent of a big European newspaper to dinner with the Pope. He was spellbound by her tales from one of the few countries he has not visited.

“The Holy Father is not the product of a bureaucracy but of an active pastor’s life,” Navarro said. “He does not depend on the Vatican structure for information but supplements it constantly with personal contacts. As a result he is exceptionally well-informed.

“And he is almost physically incapable of wasting a minute. Yet I have never seen him anguished or tense,” said Navarro, a psychiatrist who became a foreign correspondent and then joined the Pope’s service in 1985.

Aides say there is a lot of give and take at the Pope’s table. John Paul generally listens more than he talks, but Wilton Wynn, a retired American correspondent, recalls one night at Castel Gandolfo when the Pope, “like a man not used to being waited on,” shoved aside his empty soup bowl to lean across the table and hammer home points in a theological discussion.

“One hand cupping his chin, the other fingering a piece of cutlery, he was all intensity,” Wynn recalls.

John Paul uses Castel Gandolfo less than any of his recent predecessors, but it is the site of a rare fling into luxury: early in his reign he had a swimming pool built in the garden. An aide is said to have timidly inquired what people might say about the cost of the pool, and the Pope, Vatican folklore insists, replied: “Tell them it is cheaper than a conclave.”

Afternoon laps swum at Castel Gandolfo are a welcome change to his more restrictive evening walks on the rooftop terrace of his papal palace. For half an hour, he walks purposefully, back and forth, like a convict in an exercise yard, surrounded by a nonpareil view of Rome. He walks every day that it doesn’t rain, and sometimes when it does. In winter darkness his companion is a rough cape of black wool that Karol Wojtyla has worn since his days as a parish priest in Poland.

Afterward, there are more private prayers, more paperwork, meetings with Vatican department heads and his working dinner. Sometimes John Paul scans the headlines on Italian national television news, but he is not a regular viewer. At most, he sees two or three movies a year. Some evenings he works or writes until around 11 before final bedtime prayers. When John Paul reads for enjoyment it is contemporary nonfiction: anthropology, philosophy, ethics. On rare occasions he will read a novel.

Neither does the Pope rest on the seventh day. On Sunday, he prays the Angelus from his window with the crowd gathered in the historic piazza below. Sunday is also the day on which the bishop of Rome visits his parishes. He has made nearly 500 such visits so far, usually in the afternoon when the rest of the country is sleeping off a big lunch.

On one morning visit to a parish in Trastevere earlier this year, the Pope enjoyed himself too much after Mass, playing with the children, chatting with their parents. Only after repeated urging did aides manage to drag him away and siren him back to his Vatican window in time for the noon blessing.

Wanderlust is never far. One day last winter, the Pope had had enough of palace life. He wanted out, a day off. He wanted to go skiing, a lifelong passion.

“We mounted this whole secret operation, never saying a word to anyone, and we went to a mountain around 85 kilometers (about 50 miles) from Rome where a slope had been prepared,” Navarro recalls. “The Holy Father looked at it and shook his head--too easy. So everybody ran around to arrange a harder one. Then he began to ski. Up and down. Up and down. With only a snack for lunch, he skied for four, five hours. It was late in the season; there weren’t many people, and none of them realized who was skiing with them.”

At one point late in the afternoon, Navarro recalls, the tow rope mysteriously stopped. After a few minutes of cold waiting, an Italian boy of about 10 tapped the skier in front of him on the shoulder to inquire if the tow was broken.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” the skier replied, turning around.

“But, but you’re the Pope!” the boy blurted.

“The Holy Father came home a new man,” Navarro said.

The next day, Navarro told reporters about the Pope’s interlude in the mountains. By then John Paul was again wrapped solidly within the folds of a Vatican he dominates, he loves--and he loves to flee.

A Day at Home for John Paul II 5:30 a.m.: Rises in Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, then hold private devotion and says Mass with visitors. 7:30 a.m.: Begins a working breakfast of coffee, bread and fruit with guests and two personal secretaries. 8:30 a.m.: Arrives at office and works on documents sent to him by Vatican departments. 11:00 a.m.: Starts round of private “audiences” with visiting clerics or others. 1:30--2:00 p.m.: Begins a working lunch of pasta, meat and potatoes with guests, followed by quiet time for repose, prayer, reading. 5:00 p.m.: Walks alone on rooftop terrace and then does paperwork and holds more private prayers and meetings. 8:00 p.m.: Sits down to working with dinner with guests, followed by more paperwork, and bedtime prayers at 11:00 p.m.