For a Few Youths, Cavorting With Pope Over 2-Hour Lunch Is Treat of a Lifetime

They had just finished the best lunch of their young lives, but no one could remember exactly what they ate. Hey, when the pope’s your host, who notices what’s on the menu?

For three T-shirt-wearing pilgrims from Canada, Wednesday was something to shout home about: a two-hour lunch, with lots of singing, joking, even a little jock talk with Pope John Paul II in his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo in the hills outside Rome.

The pontiff is putting the Canadians and a dozen other youths up for the week at the Castel Gandolfo home.

After he sent them and the others off with hugs and a couple of mischievous twirls of his cane, the Canadians hopped a train to Rome to share their experience with some of the 700,000 other young Roman Catholics in the Italian capital this week for the Vatican’s World Youth Day events.

“I gave him a hockey jersey from the Toronto Maple Leafs with ‘Pope John Paul II’ on the back,” said Roger Gudino, 26, from that team’s town. “He said: ‘Sixty years ago I played hockey.’ ”

“He’s really human,” Gudino said in an interview. “There’s no way you’ll feel uncomfortable.”

Christopher Radziminski, who decided not to wear his Pink Floyd T-shirt for the luncheon but who kept on his not exactly spanking clean running shoes for the occasion, made no bones about it: He was dazzled by the pope’s energy at 80.

“He twirled the cane like Charlie Chaplin. He did it twice at the end,” said Radziminski, 24, from Vancouver.

“He’s switching languages like this,” said Radziminski, snapping his fingers. “French, Spanish and Portuguese and Polish.” Plus English and Italian.

“He’s sharp as a stick, man.”

Canada is expected to be the site of a future World Youth Day, a tradition started by the pope and held every other year.

Italy, the current host, was represented at Castel Gandolfo by three young men from Pisa, including one who worried that maybe he should wash the orange and black stripes out of his hair before sitting down for a meal with the pope.

The Italian, identified only as Alessandro, need not have worried.

“Oh, I like your hair,” Radziminski said the pope told Alessandro, who, like the others, was selected by organizers for the papal lodgings.

On Saturday night, after a late vigil of prayer and song with the pope on the grounds of a Rome university, the young people will stretch out in sleeping bags under the stars with perhaps 1 million of their comrades.

They will await John Paul’s return to the campus Sunday morning to conclude events he hopes will strengthen the faith of this generation of Catholics kicking off the church’s third millennium.

Hanging out with young people helps keep the pope young, said the third Canadian, Alana Cormier of Halifax.

And so many young people flock to him because “this guy has so much wisdom,” Gudino said.

But with all the chatting and singing, did anybody eat much of that memorable lunch?

“He blessed it so we had to eat it all,” Gudino said.