Today, I went into Ostia Center, site of famous Roman ruins, of which I saw nothing, concentrating as I was on obtaining batteries for my camera and some means of communicating telephonically.

I took a look at an Italian tabloid which contained shots of the favorite papabile of the locals, and concluded I had read about only one.  Guess I have been a captive of the National Catholic Reporter’s John Allen, whose authoritative dispatches from Rome had convinced me that if anybody had a clue about the next pope, it would be him.

I took the metro back to the last stop on the line, and then hiked back to camp, about 1200 km from the station.

It was hot.  I was wearing a woolly jacket, long pants, socks, and dutch clogs. But when I returned and changed into a more proper Roman frock, I began to freeze in slow motion. I had to go to the reception center to borrow a heater, which I’ve aimed at my feet.  Funny how toasty toes can stimulate brain waves.

It’s a good thing I decided to come, since the press person and president of IMWAC, Christian Weisner was unable to participate on site due to work pressures. He is managing the Web site, posting any updates, etc. So, it fell to me to compose the press releases to be issued on each day summarizing each speaker’s presentation.

It’s good to feel useful, by 11 pm, I have completed one release for Adriana Valerio, an Italian church history professor and drafted a second on a talk by Sr. Joan Chittister, a feisty Benedictine nun from Erie, Pennsylvania.

Over dinner with Isaac Wuust, one of the founders of IMWAC and the organizer of the Papal Conclave team, as the project is known, and Marlene —, another Dutch organizer, and Anthony Padovano, of CORPUS and the International Federation of Married Priests, we began exchanging stories. Anthony, who in the 1950s attended the doughty Gregorian University run by the Jesuits in Rome. He was much taken by the beauty of Pius XII’s Latin and Italian, and the sense of patrician otherworldliness of the pope who had steered the church through a German occupation. Padovano attended an audience with the saintly pope, who when he gave the blessing stared upward then spread his arms and swept them and his glance downward, as if passing the blessing directly from the Godhead to those within his compass. When Pius XII died, Padovano said he could not imagine who could possibly follow in his footsteps.

Then, at his very first audience with the new pope, the portly John XXIII looked around the room and asked, “How many of you have problems with your liver?”  People looked at each other, stunned, and a few managed to stammer that, yes, they had problems with their livers.  The pope responded with something like, “I have problems with my liver, too. I think it’s because we Italians love our wine too much.”   

Isaac Wust, whose own story encompasses years of missionary work in Columbia and intimate knowledge of the players surrounding the famous Medileen conference which ushered in liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor, recounted his own tale.  When chatting with local Italians in the countryside about the much revered Piux XII, the peasants shook their heads and patted their arms, above their crooked elbows, fist balled up.  That means, Marlene explained, that Pius XII, a Roman from a patrician family, was not a sincere man.  But for John XXIII, who sprang from peasant roots,  they adored, they would ball their fists and touch their hearts.  He spoke from the heart,” they proclaimed.  Of course, the fact that he was one of them might have helped.

The question of the night was: why did the death of John Paul II engender such an outpouring of emotion?  The city was packed with pilgrims who endured days and nights in line in order to see his body.  They slept in the streets, huddled under blankets, and rolled in sleeping bags. Old and young, many Polish people especially came to pay their respects to the man who had lifted them out of a collective sense of poor self-esteem.