A Pilgrim's Progress

By David Van Biema, with Lisa Beyer and Greg Burke/Jerusalem With additional reporting by Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem

As scheduled, Pope John Paul II knelt in the grotto of the Nativity last Wednesday. Earlier in the day he had announced that "Bethlehem is the heart of my Jubilee Pilgrimage," and now having walked slowly, on aching, 79-year-old legs, down the narrow steps from the basilica above, he found his way to his knees and prayed over the silver star in the pavement that many believe marks the very spot where Jesus Christ was born. Then--again as planned--he moved on, knelt and prayed in the adjoining Grotto of the Wise Men, where the child Jesus lay in the manger. Then the Pope stood and asked for a chair. This part was clearly not scripted. A couple of Franciscan priests scurried upstairs to get John Paul what he wanted. The Pontiff then waved everybody off, sat and prayed the Divine Office that priests are supposed to recite every day. The Pope remained alone for some 15 minutes before heading back to the steps. And then from a tiny grotto of peace, he climbed back into the middle of a political battleground.

As John Paul's journey unfolded last week, he found moments of sublime communion, as in the grotto, or near the bank of the Jordan River, where the Pope reportedly confided in companions, "In my mind I see Jesus coming to the waters...not far from here to be baptized by John the Baptist. I see Jesus passing on his way to the Holy City where he would die and rise again; I see him opening the eyes of the blind man as he passes by."

But he was also involved in a far more worldly enterprise. Papal biographer Tad Szulc has said that the Pope's 91st international trip had three aims: personal spiritual enrichment; reconciliation among all three Abrahamaic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam); and peacemaking, the duty of anyone who would call himself the vicar of Christ.

It was certainly a logical extension of one man's efforts regarding the Jews and their state: first as a Polish archbishop helping draft the Vatican II language recognizing that the Jews did not kill Jesus, and then as the Pope who pushed through the Vatican's diplomatic recognition of Israel in 1993, making a state visit possible. (The Vatican's relations with the Palestinians have long been good.)

The immediate crafting of the sojourn had been equally painstaking and personal, a powerful three-part pilgrimage recapitulating the very development of the Christian concept of God. It began officially on Feb. 24, when, denied entrance by Iraq, John Paul made a "virtual pilgrimage" (using props and videotape) to the city of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, with whom God made his first covenant. The journey continued with the Pope's visit to the mountain in Egypt thought by many to be Mount Sinai, atop which the Lord presented Moses with the Law.

And then, in a rapid acceleration that mirrors the explosion of events in the Gospels, the Pope over seven days visited Bethlehem; surveyed not one but two spots where Jesus may have been baptized; offered Mass from the site of Christ's Sermon on the Mount; climbed the steps to the upper room where tradition places the Last Supper; prayed at Gethsemane, where Jesus was betrayed; and, just before flying back to Rome, celebrated Mass again at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site at which Catholics and the Eastern churches believe Jesus was buried and resurrected. (Protestants believe Jesus rose from the nearby Garden Tomb.)

It all sounded so simple and elegant and inevitable. And yet there was almost nothing simple about the trip as it played out, because the Pope is not just a religious pilgrim. He is one of the world's great moral authorities, whose support or very presence (or even the brush of his lips on a proffered pot of soil as he visits a new land) can lend validity to states, policies and causes. Moreover, he heads an entity with its own foreign policy goals: from a desire to protect the religious sites and fast-vanishing Christians of the Holy Land, to long-held support of a Palestinian homeland, to the recent rapprochement with Israel--goals that the Pontiff could not alter simply to wow an audience. The strictly spiritual stops on the trip were interspersed with so many loaded encounters, shifting on an almost hourly basis--If this is Thursday it must be...Barak? Holocaust survivors? The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem?--that the Pope seemed like an FBI trainee in one of those fake towns with the cardboard figures, each requiring a different response, popping up one after another.

And what might all this frenzied activity accomplish, politically? It was hard to imagine. This was not Poland or Cuba, where populations and even leaders who had grown up Catholic afforded papal leverage. (The percentage of Christians in the Holy Land, including both Israel and the Palestinian territories, has decreased drastically in the past century, from 13% of the population to a tiny 2%, of which half are Orthodox rather than Roman Catholic.) John Paul made no overt attempts to influence the Israeli-Palestinian talks that continue, low key, in Washington. He did not use the trip to announce any dramatic new Vatican policy. Instead, as the week progressed, it became clear that he hoped that while tiptoeing through the political minefields, he could come to this most disputatious of territories and, through the force of his stooped presence and still Herculean will, simply inspire good.

As Father Remi Hoeckman, John Paul's point man for Catholic-Jewish relations, put it, "The Holy See does not want to interfere, but...we want to reach a point at which the Holy Land can set an example for the rest of humankind, which it's definitely not doing right now. If...in spite of a painful past we can speak with one voice, it is a sign for humankind to rediscover bonds among human beings."

The Pope's visit to Jordan, where he gazed west out over the Promised Land from Mount Nebo, just as the Bible says Moses did some 3,200 years earlier, was blessedly free of political stress, since King Abdullah took up his late father's role as regional conciliator. Within minutes after John Paul's jet touched down on Tuesday at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, however, the band struck up Jerusalem of Gold, an anthem of Jewish attachment to the entire disputed city, whose eastern portion Palestinians want for their future capital. Israeli President Ezer Weizman, acting more as hardball politician than as statesman, described "united" Jerusalem as "the capital of the state of Israel and the heart of the Jewish world." The Pope responded with a lovely speech about the "profound emotion" with which "I set foot in the land where God chose to pitch his tent," then boarded a helicopter for Jerusalem--where Mayor Ehud Olmert welcomed him to "our eternal capital."

The Vatican enjoys wide areas of agreement with Israel regarding its statehood and security, but it has pointedly called any power's unilateral actions in Jerusalem "morally and legally unacceptable." Indeed, with the exception of two Latin American countries, no nation has validated Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem by maintaining an embassy there. The Pope retired, as he would every night of the trip, in the papal nuncio's residence in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem.

The following day he walked through a mirror. At 9:30 a.m. the Israeli police--18,000 of whom, working with members of Israel's army and Shinbet intelligence agency, saw to his security most of the week--delivered him to Yasser Arafat in Bethlehem, which by the peace deal of 1995 became part of the autonomous territories under Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Arafat too described Jerusalem as the "eternal capital," but this time the capital of Palestine. The Pope responded that "the Holy See has always recognized that the Palestinian people have the natural right to a homeland" and that there would be "no end to the sad conflict in the Holy Land without stable guarantees for the rights of all the peoples involved on the basis of international law and the relevant United Nations resolutions."

He next celebrated Mass in Manger Square where, by prior negotiation, the muezzin of the mosque next door shortened his call to midday prayers so as not to disrupt the Pope too much. Still, the Pontiff seemed a bit startled when, smack between his homily and the rest of the service, the amplified Allahu Akbar (God is great) rang out. He then enjoyed his brief respite in the grotto before accompanying Arafat, who sometimes held his hand, to the nearby Deheisha refugee camp.

Deheisha embodies no one's idea of the divine. An 84-acre slum housing 10,000 people, its inhabitants are refugees from the 1948 war that followed Israel's creation and their descendants. The Deheishites, many of whom still carry the keys to homes now housing Israelis or torn down by them, demand repatriation. The Israelis insist that the refugees should receive financial compensation instead--from anyone but Israel. Speaking amid the cinder-block misery, John Paul told a small crowd, "I hope and pray that my visit will bring some comfort in your difficult situation."

The Pope's speeches were well-crafted humanitarian statements amplifying the Palestinians' need without upsetting the applecart. Arafat's wife Suha, a devout Catholic prior to her marriage who still decorates the walls of her Gaza apartment with photos of John Paul, claimed that the Holy Father's very presence was "a clear message for an independent Palestinian state." In fact, the Pope had neither mentioned a Palestinian "state" nor commented about the future of Jerusalem. Haim Ramon, Israeli Minister of Jerusalem Affairs, declared that "what the Pope said today is totally acceptable to Israeli governments" under accords long signed.

Later in the evening, young men from the Deheisha camp--many of whose inhabitants felt that Arafat had used the Pope for his larger cause but has no intention of pressing the Israelis on repatriation--rioted in the streets against Palestinian police after John Paul had left.

On Thursday, Edith Zierer was waiting for him. Fifty-five years ago, recently liberated from a Nazi work camp, the 14-year-old girl had walked as far as she could toward Krakow and then had lain down, expecting to die of exhaustion. "I was with swollen feet and with nothing to continue in my heart," she recalled. Suddenly a priest [actually a seminarian] appeared, dressed in brown, "strong and tall and very handsome...It was as if someone from the heavens had been sent down to me." He brought her tea, bread and cheese, then carried her on his back three kilometers to a train station. He called her Edita--the first time since her deportation that anyone had called her by anything but a number. When they reached Krakow, some other Jews told her to abandon the priest lest he try to convert her, and she hid. But she remembered his name and that he was from Wadowice. Reading a story on the new Pope in Paris Match in 1978, she said, "This is the man who saved me!" Today she came to Yad Vashem to thank him.

And she did, tears streaming down her face as that strapping young priest--now the frail, elderly Pontiff--laid his hand gently on her arm. After meeting Zierer and five other survivors in the memorial's Hall of Remembrance, John Paul opened his heart. Recalling "friends and neighbors" who perished, he said, "Men, women and children cry out to us from the depths of the horror that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry?" He continued, "I assure the Jewish people that the Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."

As at Deheisha, the speech's effect depended on whether one listened to the Pope's music or his words. He made no mention of flash points such as the "silence" of Holocaust-era Pope Pius XII or the distinction between sins of misguided church members and the possible misguidance of the church as a whole. Some Jewish leaders later pointed this out. But most echoed the American Jewish Congress's Phil Baum, who admitted that "it was perhaps wishful thinking that the Pope would explicitly apologize in his visit to Yad Vashem today for the silence of Pope Pius XII and the institutional church during the Holocaust." Baum added that "it is sometimes forgotten that the Vatican bears no direct responsibility for the Holocaust." Although the church had been "cruelly delinquent" in its response to the horror, "that moral failure, at least, the Pope's words today have done much to remedy." Perhaps most important, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, whose voice cracked as he talked of grandparents murdered at Treblinka, movingly hailed the Pope's statements, in effect accepting them as an apology.

With his nuanced and elegant responses to challenges posed by Deheisha and Yad Vashem, it seemed briefly that the Pope might have a true knack for parsing the Holy Land's distressing riddles. But by that evening the region once more manifested its ability to humble even the most high-minded and surefooted. For months John Paul had been anticipating a grand interfaith meeting between himself and Jewish and Muslim leaders. Originally he planned it for Mount Sinai, but the location was dropped as logistically difficult. Then Jerusalem's Grand Mufti Ekrema Sabri, the chief Muslim leader in the Palestinian territories, declined to meet with the rabbis, whom he accuses of making "anti-Muslim remarks." To provide a stand-in, Arafat promoted religious judge Sheik Taysir Tamimi from a lesser position to deputy chief of the West Bank Islamic Courts.

When the event, which did not make most American TV news shows, finally took place in the Pontifical Institute of Notre Dame, Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau sent a murmur through the crowd by claiming, falsely, that the Pope had recognized Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. Tamimi's presentation, delivered in a harsh tone, was so bitterly partisan that the moderator felt the need to "remind everyone of the spirit in which we came here today, as religious people who can put aside our politics." The Pope sat through much of the meeting with his hand to his forehead, although whether out of fatigue, disappointment or despair was hard to say.

He enjoyed a moment of triumph on Friday when, on the mountain where Jesus was said to have delivered the Sermon on the Mount, he celebrated Mass for 80,000 mostly youthful believers. They were from around the world, but a sizable number were Lebanese, and parts of the Mass were in Arabic. Said Wadie Abu-Nassar, director of the Great Jubilee Office in Jerusalem: "Since the time of Jesus, no one has ever managed to bring a crowd like this together in a peaceful way. When crowds like this have gathered in the past it was normally for a war."

On Saturday, with some help from the Israeli police, John Paul defied rumors of trouble at Nazareth's Church of the Annunciation. It was in this place that the Angel Gabriel is believed to have told Mary she would give birth to the Messiah; accordingly, a legend on the altar reads HERE THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH. But it was also here last year that Muslim riots broke out when Christians objected to a mosque going up nearby. No disturbances rent the peace during the Pope's two-hour Mass, however, perhaps because a Muslim prayer leader preached against disturbances after a brief spate of shouts and whistles, or perhaps because the threat of violence was exaggerated.

By Saturday the Pontiff's strength was flagging somewhat, and there was concern about how he would fare on his pilgrimage's final day. But he managed to celebrate his week's last Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher shortly after a visit to the Western Wall of the Temple, Judaism's most holy shrine, and before that, to a place only a football field away that Muslims call the Square of the [al-Aqsa] Mosque. There, he finally met with the Grand Mufti, who had again muddied the proceedings by telling reporters on Saturday that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust "was less than 6 million," and that "Israel is using the issue to get sympathy worldwide." Said the Mufti to the Pope on Sunday: "We request that you stand by justice in order to end the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem."

Over the week it was occasionally painful to watch the Pope--a man who once hiked and skied regularly, now barely able to raise his head--struggling to control his trembling hands and slurring his words. But it is worth noting that on Thursday, the day the full brunt of his Middle Eastern schedule should have rendered him almost lifeless, his voice, as he preached at Galilee, was as loud and firm as it has been in recent memory, and he gamely took on a 30-stair climb from the lakeside--as if, rather than sapping him, the realization of this decades-long dream and the opportunity to speak once more to a waiting world were nourishing body as well as soul.

The Parkinson's disease from which John Paul suffers is a terrible foe; but unlike Alzheimer's or a host of other neurological ailments, it tends to spare the mind. Arafat learned that when he presented John Paul with a gift representing the "14 Stations of the Cross." "Fifteen," deadpanned the Pope. (Though it's not widely known, the church has added the Resurrection.) They both laughed, and Arafat acknowledged the correction. Neither the Pope's acuity nor his timing had deteriorated.

And timing has always been his gift. Just when the Soviet Empire was ripe for the tipping, the Polish Pope provided a nudge. When Cuba's relationship with America was so sour that Fidel Castro might have grabbed at almost anything to improve it, John Paul arrived, provided an opportunity and--not incidentally--revived the rights of Christians on Castro's island. When deeds needed to be put to Vatican II's words in 1986, this Pope knew enough to visit a synagogue.

It could happen again. The situation in the Middle East is delicate but promising. A former Israeli commando is looking for his opening; an American President is circling in search of a legacy. It would not be surprising, a few years down the road, to hear from an Arafat, a Barak, a Clinton or even an Assad that one of the things that kept them on track in the fateful spring and summer of 2000 had been a bent old man who dropped by the neighborhood and suggested, by word and deed, what strong will, good faith and leadership were all about.

--With additional reporting by Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem