A Young Pilgrim’s Glowing Memory

Not long before Pope John Paul II died Saturday, pigeons flitted through the colonnade and marbled saints blended in with the dusk as Sean Kiely sat in St. Peter’s Square reading the Handbook of Prayers.

He was one pilgrim in a crowd of thousands. He looked to the pontiff’s apartment windows. Years before, he had been up there as a boy in a coat and tie following a priest through the Hall of Maps and into the pope’s private chapel.

“My family and I showed up at 7:30 in the morning,” said Kiely, an Oregon native and college freshman, remembering that day in 1998. “My sister received her First Communion from him. He was a lot smaller up close. He was hunched over, but he glowed. I kissed his ring.”

Few encounters in life can turn a boy’s wonder into a young man’s conviction.

But that day when John Paul said Mass -- his hands shaking not so much back then -- steeled Kiely’s faith.

John Paul was the only pope the 18-year-old has known. He became a sort of aging grandfather or uncle, a boxer sound of mind but robbed of his footwork.

“I’ve seen old film clips of the pope getting off a plane and kneeling and kissing the ground. But as he got older, they had to lift the earth toward him,” said Kiely, who wore a checkered shirt, curry-colored pants and a bracelet that spelled “pro-life.”

“He was an avid skier. He was athletic.... But those are the things that have been stripped away from him. He even lost his voice.”

Kiely doesn’t want to be a priest. God, he said, has not called him. But he uses the example of John Paul’s determined spirit to foster his own religious beliefs.

“In our secular world today, especially in America, we live in a degrading society, and John Paul never backed down on his moral principles,” he said. “He inspired me. I took heat many days in my public school for my beliefs, especially when I got up and gave speeches against capital punishment, abortion and the Iraq war. In one debate on abortion, it was 27 students against one. Me.”

Kiely said he saw John Paul a second time during one of the pope’s Wednesday audiences in St. Peter’s Square.

Hundreds were there on that October day last year. Kiely clasped the pope’s hand and stepped aside.

“His facial features had changed dramatically since the first time I had seen him,” he said. “His back was more arched and stooped. His skin sagged, and you saw his obvious suffering.”

Kiely thumbed through his prayer book. A woman said the rosary while holding her daughter. Young people sang.

A light came on in the pope’s apartment. Everyone clapped and a stiff brisk breeze blew through the square. Less than two hours later, news spread that John Paul had died.