The Vatican's Noisy Family

When a multimillion-dollar Vatican building program reaches completion next winter, it will add a boldly modern look to the city's architecture, as well as to a few Roman Catholic traditions. Chief among these is the peculiar spectacle known as the Pope's general audience. Since its beginning during the first decade of the 20th century, this event has usually taken place in St. Peter's Basilica, a resplendent setting that is unfortunately characterized by slushy acoustics and poor visibility. Centerpiece of the current Vatican construction is a sleek new papal audience hall designed by Pier Luigi Nervi, with well-planned, air-conditioned facilities for 14,000 pilgrims. Once it goes into use, the atmospheric old St. Peter's audiences will fade forever. Last week TIME'S Rome Bureau Chief Jim Bell revisited one to savor the sights and sounds --and smells--for the last time. His report:

"You mean we're supposed to applaud?" asks the lady from Wichita, Kans. "Why, I never heard of such a thing." The general audience is indeed something to stretch Anglo-Saxon and North European credulity. It is a religious occasion presided over by the spiritual leader of 600 million Catholics; yet at times it resembles nothing so much as Shea Stadium on banner night, with overtones of the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, the National Spelling Bee and the state fair.

Despite recent efforts to limit attendance, the general audience still draws an average of 10,000 people to the regular Wednesday and occasional Saturday sessions. Hence a battle for position goes on. And it is difficult to appreciate the glory of Michelangelo and Bernini when some child is whacking your shins, a woman has her pocketbook jammed into your floating rib and half a dozen nuns are giving you the old high-low so the mother superior can better enjoy this supreme moment.

Herded Sheep. They start gathering in St. Peter's Square as the sun comes over the magnificent Bernini colonnade --black suits and neckties, Bermuda shorts and T shirts, miniskirts barely covering buttocks, long-sleeved dresses with mantillas. In long lines before wooden barriers, young couples love each other up, oldsters lean wearily on crutches. A roar of protest in a dozen languages goes up as a middle-aged American with a red face tries an end run. He is spat on as he retreats, his wife near tears.

When the barriers go down and the bronze doors of St. Peter's part, people are herded like stray sheep into pens on both sides of the central nave. Outside, a few holders of blue tickets are ushered along niches and cornices of pitted travertine marble through a side entrance and into box seats from which they can observe, with slightly arched nostrils, the antics below.

It is hot. The stench of body odor in some of the tightly packed pens is overpowering. Behind the adults massed along the nave, children run and play, whooping happily at hide-and-seek. Everywhere there are gaggles of giggling girls in school uniforms and confirmation dresses. In a side chapel a priest says Mass, ignoring the hubbub around him. Friends are made in the boxes: "You're from Pottstown? Well, for heaven's sake, we live just outside Philadelphia . . ." A choir of German clerics bursts into a Gregorian chant. Nuns prod their charges to raise sweet voices in entirely different song.

Just before 11 a.m., after nearly everybody has been standing or sitting for an hour and a half, the altar lights go up. To the right of the nave, red curtains swing open, and there, borne by a dozen sediari in scarlet knee breeches. Pope Paul VI sails high above the crowd in his sedia gestatoria (literally, carrying chair). A roar goes up such as the home team gets when it trots out of the dugout. As Paul glides down the nave, flashbulbs erupt like sheet lightning on a summer's night. Pale and powdery, his eyes glazed by the light, the Pops holds his hands high. They wave slowly like the fins of some exotic tropical fish. A blue-haired lady from Philadelphia cries, "Oh, Howard, he has such a beautiful countenance!" "Salut!" shouts a German voice. "Viva, viva!" echoes an Italian.

At the Bernini altar, Paul takes his throne and launches into his message (read in Italian). The crowd settles back, the loudspeakers hiss and waves of sound pile on top of each other. Many of the pilgrims understand nothing of what is going on. Four American men lean on a railing, discussing their adventures in Rome.

Ecstatic Screams. Paul's message concluded, tension spreads through the pens, for now is the last chance to see His Holiness. As he makes his final giro (tour around), nuns crawl over kids, well-dressed men elbow women in their eagerness to touch the Pope's hand. The air is full of ecstatic screaming. A row or two of benches collapse with a cracking sound like gunfire. No one pays any attention--and no one is hurt.

When it is all over at 12:40, people blink and yawn at each other. The floor is littered with candy wrappers, newspapers, film boxes. "Very moving," says a woman from Ireland. "But it is wearying to keep small children quiet all this time." A liberal Catholic professor on leave from U.C.L.A. is angry as he shuffles toward the piazza with his wife and five children: "This whole business is a sideshow. It has nothing to do with religion." His wife disagrees. "The church," she says quietly, "is one great big family, and families are noisy --you know that."

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