Pope’s Visit a Touchstone for These L.A. Kids

Some rarely divulge details of the encounter. “I consider it more of a private matter than anything else,” says Joseph Gonzalez, now 30.

Others delight in talking about it. “Oh, gosh, I tell everybody,” says Guido Nunez, also 30. “That’s my highlight.”

It was on Sept. 16, 1987, that 21 children at Immaculate Conception grammar school in the Pico Union neighborhood -- sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders -- met and talked with Pope John Paul II during his visit to Los Angeles.

Meeting the pope did not guard all of them against estrangement from the Roman Catholic Church. It did not keep them from crisis or from questioning.

But as several of the former students looked back this week, they said the meeting did bestow an unwavering sense of connection -- not necessarily with the church but with its charismatic father.

Even those who strayed say they believe they have stayed true to the essence of Catholicism because they met the embodiment of Catholicism.

“I’ll never forget my father said, ‘You’re very fortunate to have hugged Jesus Christ,’ ” recalls Lorena Vega, 31. “He said, ‘I absolutely believe he has the spirit of Jesus Christ. You were one of the fortunate ones.’ ” Tears well in her eyes.

The pope is still a presence at Immaculate Conception -- then and now an overwhelmingly Latino school, not far from downtown Los Angeles.

“I pass by his picture every day when I come into the office,” says Mary Ann Murphy, 51, who has been the principal since shortly before the papal visit. “His being with the children was just an awesome experience.”

For Vega, a 14-year-old eighth-grader at the time, the moment of awe came at an assembly of all the school’s students. A deeply religious child, she began sobbing uncontrollably as the pontiff bade them farewell.

When he passed Vega, John Paul embraced her.

“I remember he said, ‘I love you. We will always be together through prayer.’ Now that I’m an adult, I value it a lot more. I understand it a lot more.”

Vega says she will never forget his eyes. “They were gorgeous blue.”

A decade later, Vega got to see John Paul again at a youth pilgrimage in France. This time she was one of about a million.

“He said, ‘Do not be afraid to evangelize,’ ” she recalls.

“At that time I did not know if I wanted to get married or be a nun,” Vega says. But John Paul had told the group that they could be apostles of faith no matter their vocation, and Vega took those words to heart. She met her husband that year and they now have three children, ages 1, 3, and 4. She is pregnant with her fourth. She was married at Immaculate Conception Church and had her children baptized there.

“To society, I’m basically seen as a nobody,” says Vega, who graduated from a Catholic girls’ high school and says she spent three years at Mount St. Mary’s College. “Yet I value what I’m doing. Not only am I committed to transmitting my faith to my children, but I’m committed to bringing them up well in the world.”

Vega takes comfort in knowing that as she bucks the tide of women having careers and fewer children, so did John Paul buck liberal trends in his staunch promotion of conservative doctrine.

“I feel blessed; I feel the pope’s influence,” she says. “If you believe God is in your life, he will provide.”

But while Vega’s encounter with John Paul deepened her faith and her connection to the church, others found that the pope set a standard his church failed to meet.

Lorena Mull was 11 when she asked the pope about forgiving his enemies. “A very interesting question,” he told her.

“I don’t remember it in that great detail,” says Mull, 29, laughing. She graduated from Woodbury University in Burbank, lives in Mount Washington with her fiance and works for an electrical engineer.

“I still consider myself Catholic,” she says. Meeting the pope “played a big role in that.”

Yet she hasn’t attended Mass for two years. For most of her young life, she was dutiful. But as she grew older, she questioned church doctrines and found her local priests wanting.

When she was 13, a priest to whom she had told her troubles in a confessional betrayed her confidence in a later conversation with her and her mother, she recalls. “It was nothing very bad, but I was so embarrassed.”

Another time, she says, she watched Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony wordlessly walk past a barefoot homeless man who had approached him for help. “I thought that was so ungodly,” she says.

“I was around a lot of clergy, and they weren’t as holy as I expected them to be,” she says.

But she believes in the basic morality gleaned from her years of Catholic school. “In my everyday life, I still respect others and try to treat everyone else well and strive to be a good person.”

With an affectionate chuckle, Mull says her devout, Mexican-born Catholic mother frowns upon Mull’s mix of Catholicism with a lifestyle that departs from the church’s norms.

Mull became engaged last year, but she and her fiance have lived together for seven years. The last time she went to Mass was two years ago; she was accompanied by her mother.

“I went up and received the Eucharist. She said, ‘I can’t believe you did that. You’re living in sin.’ ”

For Joseph Gonzalez, 30, “meeting the pope was the most influential meeting I’ve ever had with anybody.”

As a 14-year old eighth-grader, he could not say anything or move when he was in the pope’s presence. “All I could do was stare,” he says.

He found his voice at Don Bosco Technical Institute in Rosemead, run by the Catholic Salesian Brothers. “For years, I defended Catholicism in high school when we would talk about religions and which was best,” he says.

One of the issues debated at his school, he says, was birth control and whether to use it. “What I decided to do for a long time was abstinence,” says Gonzalez. “Oh, it is really tough. When you’re a teen, you’ve got girls coming around.”

But by his 20s, when he was working, “life kind of gets shoved in your face,” he says. “I said, ‘OK, Joe, you’ve got two things to deal with: religion and reality.’ I dealt with reality.”

Sixteen months ago, he fathered a child, then got married. Now he works in information technology and graphic design for a printing company and lives in Panorama City with his wife and baby daughter.

Work and family obligations led him to stop attending Mass weekly, but now, as the baby grows, he wants to attend more regularly.

“The only thing I really attribute to this encounter with the pope is this feeling that someone is watching over me,” he says, “and whatever I decide to do, I’m going to be OK.”

There was a point in the life of Teresa Tello Groak, 30, when she had to tell herself that as well.

“I was pregnant when I was 19,” says Groak, who as a seventh-grader had considered asking the pope about the church’s stance on surrogate mothers. (The pope never got to her in the question-and-answer session.)

After Notre Dame Academy, she ran “with the wrong crowd,” she says.

“I seriously considered having an abortion,” she says, “but my mom, a very devout Catholic, helped me to make the right decision to keep the baby. It was one of the toughest decisions of my life. Now I understand the pope’s message of pro-life. There’s a soul there. And you don’t know what plan God has for you.”

That part of John Paul’s message shaped Groak’s life. Yet, eventually, she left the church.

The pregnancy led her to drop out of Loyola Marymount University and end up at Los Angeles City College. There she met the man she eventually married.

She had begun to feel disconnected from the rituals of the Mass. Her husband invited her to join him at a Self-Realization Fellowship temple.

“When I was there, I felt like I was home,” says Groak.

Like most of the former students, she has moved away from Immaculate Conception’s urban parish. She works for an agency that helps families whose children have developmental problems and she lives in La Mirada with her husband, three daughters -- 10, 4 and 2 -- and sometimes her husband’s 9-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.

From her encounter with John Paul, she remembers what she perceived as his kindness. “It was like having your grandfather in the room,” she says. “With him passing, it feels like my grandfather passed.”

Guido Nunez remembers his classmates standing in a horseshoe configuration as the pope went around the group, kissing all of them on the head and hugging them.

Nunez, who was 12 years old and anxious, offered the pontiff a red rose from his mother. “Oh, thank you!” the pope said.

Today, his mother has left the church. So has his brother. Like millions of Latinos in the United States, they have moved from Catholicism to rapidly growing Protestant denominations. Stemming that outflow is one of the biggest challenges that church leaders say the next pope will face.

But Nunez has clung to his Catholic faith. “Who knows -- if I hadn’t met him, maybe I would have changed religions like they did,” he says.

“I don’t have any kids or anything, but I can’t think of one thing that ranks higher than that day,” adds Nunez, 30, a business analyst for Unilever who earned his MBA from Loyola Marymount and just bought a house in Pico Rivera.

Eighteen years later, he’s still telling people about that meeting. “In the next 18 years it will still be a highlight.”

He has a videotape of the meeting. “My family laughs and says, ‘Why do you look so frightened?’ You meet this individual, and he embodies everything you believe -- how could you not be frightened?”

Others say it was only later that they grasped the immensity of the moment.

“I don’t think I really understood how much of a big deal it was until afterward, when he drove through Los Angeles,” says Lorena Mull. Only then did she see that people had thronged the streets for the possibility of a mere glimpse of the pope.

Mull’s mother kept the rosary the pope gave her, along with pictures of the children meeting the pope and newspaper clippings.

But Mull rarely brings up her part in the papal encounter. It takes something unusual -- such as the time she met a man who was carrying a lunch pail decorated with commemorative stickers from the pope’s 1987 visit.

“I said, ‘You know, I was there. I was one of the papal children.’ ”