A View From The Flock

By David Van Biema/St. Louis

His doctors had told him to skip St. Louis; and by the final day of John Paul's visit it was clear why. At a prayer service in the city's beautiful basilica he coughed--not continuously, but so deeply that his body jumped forward slightly. His speech, clear enough at a youth rally the night before to elicit roars of laughter, was more slurred. A short prayer he should have spoken was assumed by an assistant.

But there were also reasons why a frail 78-year-old with Parkinson's spent two hectic days in the river city. One was that by hopping from deeply Catholic Mexico City to Catholic-founded St. Louis, he stressed solidarity within the huge territory that, despite political and economic disparities, the Vatican likes to call simply "America." Another was Archbishop Justin Rigali of St. Louis, a beloved adviser. The third reason, more subtle but equally important, might be dubbed Betty Rataj.

Betty Rataj has beaten the clock. The alarm is set for 3:30 a.m., but like a kid before Christmas, she is up and about in her red bathrobe 10 minutes early. Outside, the St. Louis suburb of University City is asleep. But on the Rataj month-at-a-glance calendar, a crisp notation--"B&E: Papal Mass"--dictates an early start. Betty, 50, comes back down the hall with a black suit on and a pin-striped, bleary-eyed corporate lawyer, her husband Ed, in tow. She glows. "I woke up smiling," says the mother of five. "I think this is the greatest thing that could happen to an adult Catholic." Even one who, like most American believers, is still sorting out her feelings about the head of her church, 20 years into his tenure.

Roman Catholicism as practiced in America is not a consistent phenomenon. The day after John Paul left Missouri, Governor Mel Carnahan commuted the sentence of a convicted triple murderer from death to life without parole. Carnahan, a Baptist, announced that "I continue to support capital punishment," but after the Pontiff's "direct and personal appeal...I decided to grant his request." The irony is that while the Pope's argument that "the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil" may have swayed Carnahan, if only temporarily, Gallup polls find 53% of the Catholic American flock rejecting the position. In a TIME/CNN poll conducted last week, 86% of those responding declared they found it "possible to disagree with the Pope on articles of faith and still be a good Catholic." Such cafeteria Catholicism may not track logically. But it makes emotional and cultural sense, in the same way as Betty Rataj's twin assertions that "The Pope is rarely mentioned in our household, and rarely mentioned as part of our Catholicism" and "Being in his presence would be being in the presence of the most spiritual being that exists on earth. If he said, 'Hi, Betty,' I would burst into tears."

Her first Pope was Pius XII. Her parents found him "a bit sour." Growing up in Lebanon, Ky., Betty Spalding went to confession, heard Mass in Latin and wore a demure chapel veil. She prayed avidly: "I was adding it up, earning heaven." In junior high school the nuns told her that John XXIII, Pius' successor, was "opening the windows of the church, and that appealed to me." Not that she would dream of contradicting a Pontiff anyway. "If the Pope said it, that was fine with me," she recalls.

By 1968 she had revised that stance. Thanks to John's Second Vatican Council, Mass was now in English and the priest and congregation interacted. In retrospect, she thinks this may have kept her in the church. But in that year John's successor and the council's inheritor, Paul VI, loosed a thunderbolt: Catholics could not use artificial means of birth control and remain in good graces. "No way," says Betty. "No how. Period."

Suddenly the Pope was neither remote nor abstract; he was in Betty's bedroom. "For the first year and a half after Ed and I were married in 1970, we were not in a position to have any children," she says. "I saw Paul VI as representative of a very conservative Vatican. Obviously these people weren't out in the trenches." Like many American Catholics, Betty and Ed embraced a concept extolled by liberal American clerics: "We heard, 'a matter of conscience,'" she says, "and we declared birth control to be one. We would decide it according to our own good consciences and the Pope could go...be a Pope."

White bulbs on a hot baby-blue background: the message board in the St. Louis Trans World Dome scrolls WELCOME TO THE EUCHARISTIC CELEBRATION WITH HIS HOLINESS JOHN PAUL II. The Dome's 70,000 capacity is stretched to 100,000. Betty and Ed, after hours on a chartered yellow school bus and in line for metal detectors, have drawn spectacular second-row seats: they can almost touch the stream of priests flowing across the floor toward the great papal seal. A jumbo screen shows the approaching Popemobile, just half an hour away. She twists a silver ring again and again around her middle finger.

"I just don't see why it is such a big flippin' deal that the Pope is coming here," said Suzie Rataj, with her parents and younger brothers weeks before the Pope's visit. Edward Jr., the eldest of Ed and Betty's children, is no longer Catholic; Anne, 20, remains with the church; 17-year-old twins Charlie and Tom attend Mass. ("It's a rule here, like keeping gas in the car," says Betty.) Suzie, 23, calls herself "nonpracticing."

Charlie, the smooth-haired twin, quotes a young cousin who, informed that the best Cardinal becomes Pope, asked, "So Mark McGwire will be next?" Tom, the twin with the hat, reports some of his classmates talking about scalping papal tickets. "The first thing that came into my mind," he says, "is that they're going to hell." That merits a couple of giggles.

They stop, however, when talk turns to John Paul's apostolic letter ruling out the ordination of women priests. "I wouldn't mind seeing some," says Betty. "But I think a lot of people would fall away. I think the church is not ready for it. "

"They just need to get ready," says Suzie. "I just have my 12 years of Catholic education, but I know the Bible was written by people in a society run by men, so women wouldn't be included in the power structure. But the Pope, who has studied the Bible his entire 78 years or whatever, cannot look at it and understand that it isn't because of God that women are not in the power circle, but because it was..."

"The custom," Betty finishes for her. Her thoughts drift to the upcoming visit. "It's not anything he says as a man. This is a person who, if he had been around at the time, Jesus would have said, 'You're Peter, and upon this rock I build this church.'"

"I'll make it easy for you, Suzie," Ed says. "Didn't the early church have women bishops?" The question is facetious; he sides with John Paul. "The Pope," he says, "is the Supreme Court. He's never wrong, because he gets the last word." Ed used to sympathize with arguments for the death penalty. But now, in the full force of John Paul's dissent, he says, "I have moved."

"Why can the Pope tell you to do it and you say O.K.?" Suzie asks.

"Most of the time I'll be all right if I rely on the church," says Ed. "They've accomplished a lot by moving very slowly and avoiding pitfalls. When the chairman of my law firm says this is the way we're gonna do it, that's the way it's gonna get done. When the Pope is talking about whether there are going to be women priests or not, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time raging about it."

"He wins," offers Betty.

"He wins," agrees Ed.

"Fine," says Suzie. "Then they could have their church."

John Paul's Catholicism is suffused with intercessory prayer and its necessary premises, the supernatural and the miraculous. That is no longer Betty Rataj's way. She has a formidable charitable schedule: the Immacolata Parish mission, the auction for her sons' De Smet Jesuit High School, her work for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. But as the papal visit approached, local priests asked congregants to offer up prayers for the Pope. The resulting pledges would eventually be presented to John Paul as "a spiritual bouquet." "Did I sign up?" asks Betty. "No. I would have forgotten. If I say I'm going to say one rosary, that sounds kind of stupid. But if I were to say I'm going to say 20, by No. 5 I'd have forgotten." "I do very little formal prayer. I talk to God, I chat about where I am. 'My God, what are we going to do about Suzie?' Or a lot of thank yous. But it's not like I'm saying Our Fathers or Hail Marys and going over for Eucharistic adoration." The admission makes her mournful. Betty watches the elderly, bent man approaching across the Dome floor in his Popemobile. Physical limitations notwithstanding, he is still handsome. He rolls to within 100 feet of her. Fifty. He is within 15. Betty Rataj, a trained mathematician, has been waving her hands approximately like someone trying to wash two adjacent windows. Suddenly she yells, "He looked at me! I swear he looked right at me! He waved at me!"

In the end the Pope doesn't even need to say "Hi, Betty." At the first amen her voice seems to catch a little. But she does not weep during the reading from the Gospel nor the recitation of the Creed nor the homily. Rather, it is something that he doesn't say that moves her. As he prepares for Holy Communion at the altar, the Pope bows his head and prays. Silently. Yet she still hears the blessing he is invoking: "May the bread become our spiritual food; may the wine become our spiritual drink." The unspoken words ring in her head, and she is overwhelmed: "The prayer he's saying is the same thing you hear every Sunday. That everybody hears. No matter where you go, people would know..." And that very universality, of which this man is still the vibrant center, overcomes her.

"It's so hard to explain," Betty says about being a modern American Catholic weeping at the sight of her Pope. "It's not a head thing; it's a heart thing. No, it's a heart and a head thing."

Seven hours after Betty Rataj roused herself for him, John Paul II, the Pontiff with whom she agrees--sometimes--looks out at her and says, "The peace of the Lord be with you always."

To which she replies, "And also with you."

--With reporting by Greg Burke, with the Pope in St. Louis

With reporting by Greg Burke, with the Pope in St. Louis