About Andrew Phelps
Andrew Phelps is a WBUR reporter and the host of Hubbub, a new blog about Boston.
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Watching the pope die, in real time
There is rarely an event that compels me to turn on the television.
Perhaps the scars of the 9/11 media deluge have caused me to shun the medium forever. But the passing of Pope John Paul II, an emotional, historic, and — for me — first-time event, forced me to indulge the institution whose cultural byproducts John Paul resisted, but that defined his entire papacy: Mass Media, with its banner headlines, flagrant exaggerations (“THE WORLD PRAYS”), and hours and hours and hours of repetitive coverage.
As the pope’s physiological collapse unfurled on my computer screen, I found my index finger trained on my Web browser’s Refresh key, waiting impatiently for the banner headline that would announce his death.
It came at about a quarter to noon.
Pope John Paul II, Church Shepherd and a Catalyst for World Change, Dies at 84
The front page of NYTimes.com pushed me to tears, tears that I had somehow timed for just this moment. But as I sat in silence and listened to myself cry, I heard that they were real tears. Not long after I started, I tried to understand why they came.
Why was I sad? I’m not Catholic, although my father was and my Italian family is. I also don’t agree with many of the late pope’s moral edicts. But John Paul was a man larger than the life, as catholic as he was Catholic, kind to look at, loving, mystical on stage, and utterly devoted to people.
Salon.com’s Amy Sullivan captured the loss well:
We can no sooner imagine a new man filling his shoes than a new Elvis appointed as a replacement within weeks after Elvis Presley’s death. It is unthinkable.
To experience this moment, though, I needed to see and hear it. For once, I would not just rely on vibrant newspaper articles. I turned on the television and found Aaron Brown, live from Vatican City, on CNN. It was difficult to tell whether his sorrow was genuine, and I managed to put aside the compromise of objectivity, as well as his frequent commentary about the Schiavo irony.
Beautiful to me were the images and sounds of an organic experience a half-world away, of the reality of mourning, of the rawness of tens of thousands of people who could not care less about the video cameras. My tears came into focus as I listened to the man deliver the Lord’s prayer in Neapolitan.
And I was watched George and Laura Bush walk to the lectern of The Cross Hall, which is specially reserved for solemn occasions, I marveled at what I saw: two different worlds mourning in split-screen.
As the men on both screens spoke, I began to tune out their words, fascinated and fixated on a medium that transcends time zones.
I sent Krystill a text message in the midst of my reflection. “I have been crying over the pope,” I wrote.
She called me later, uncertain of whether I’d heard the final news.
“The pope died,” she exclaimed. I was taken aback by her easygoing tone. She said it was a moment to celebrate, that the pope could finally rest in heavenly company after suffering. That’s what Christianity is, she said.
I knew, but death is as much grief as it is celebration, I argued, and I was not jubilant.
Perhaps it was those headlines, the photographs of women in tears on bended knees, the full-body sound of the bells in St. Peter’s Square, that did it for me. I felt a part of the pain of the world, a brotherly bond, the universal pain of losing a good man. But maybe the media just manufactured it for me.
I suspect Krystill had not followed the story and its every turn as closely as I did, and I suspect she is not worse off than I am.
“He lived a long, popey life,” she said enthusiastically.
Hours later, the television still droned in the background. I looked up to see the same commentators saying the same things, with the same, silly close-ups of the third-story papal apartment and the same Schiavo-irony commentary. I ran to the set in disgust to turn it off.
I think it will be a long time before I turn that thing on again.
1 Comment on ‘Watching the pope die, in real time’
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I like the narative angle, you should write a column