VATICAN CITY—With papal fever driven to a frenzy in Catholic Philippines, will the final Mass of Pope Francis at Rizal Park on Jan. 18 match or even exceed the 5 million that packed the same location when Pope, now Saint, John Paul II, celebrated the Mass to close the World Youth Day in Manila in 1995?
“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Sean Patrick Lovett, director for English programming of Radio Vaticana.
Lovett, a 40-year veteran at the Vatican radio station, was in the 1995 Mass, which has posted a record in the Guinness Book of World Records as the single biggest gathering of humanity in history.
“Who knows there could be a similar number gathering there [for Pope Francis]?” he added.
Or more?
Lovett has been with the Vatican radio station since Pope, now Blessed, Paul VI, and he said he had always marveled at the crush of Filipino Catholics turning up for major papal events.
He said he was in South Korea during the Pope’s visit, when 1 million gathered for the Mass for Korean martyrs, and “everybody [was] in silence, in prayer, in total self-control— beautiful!”
Lovett said Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle was sitting next to him and said, “It’s not going to be like this in Manila.”
‘We’re excitable people’
He said he was very impressed with the Catholic fervor of Filipinos so that he, an Irish, had been frequently in Manila (he was in Manila only last year giving a social media seminar to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines on the invitation of its president, Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas), and he considers himself “half-Filipino.”
“We Filipinos are excitable people and it doesn’t take much for us to be excited,” he said jokingly about the papal frenzy.
He looked back fondly to 1995 when having set up work at Manila Hotel, he saw the mass of humanity gathered for St. John Paul II’s final Mass.
Lovett said John Paul II had wanted to motorcade to Quirino Grandstand, but it proved impossible since hundreds of thousands, many of them World Youth Day delegates, had camped overnight and occupied every inch of space.
Perfect landing
He said President Fidel V. Ramos lent the presidential helicopter to bring John Paul II to the Mass site. It landed on the roof of the Apostolic Nunciature on Taft Avenue, he added, but since there was but a narrow strip of land between the grandstand and Manila Bay, a test was made in which certain members of the papal entourage went ahead to the park to see if the pilot could land the helicopter safely.
“He made a perfect landing on a postage stamp of earth,” Lovett said.
The guinea pigs having survived the landing, the helicopter ferried John Paul II to Rizal Park.
Joaquin Navarro Valls, the Vatican spokesperson at that time, said they kept adjusting the size of the crowd, which just grew and grew so that “we just stopped counting.”
The online news agency Christian Today predicted that the 1995 record would be broken. “Pope Francis is expected to surpass the 5 million people who convened when Pope John Paul II visited the country in 1995 for World Youth Day,” it reported.
Survivors of calamities
Alan Holdren of the American Catholic broadcast agency Eternal Word Television Network said the highlight of the visit would certainly be Pope Francis’ encounter with the survivors of the 2013 earthquake in Bohol and Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) in Tacloban City on Jan. 17.
Lovett agreed, saying he was present when the Pope held a special Mass for the Filipino community at St. Peter’s Basilica in the aftermath of Yolanda.
The Pope didn’t come with a prepared speech and spoke “from the heart and with the heart,” Lovett said. “He just stood there with the people crying and said: ‘We must ask God why this happened. We must accept it, God loves us, but we must ask, since we have the right to, just like a child to a parent.’ I was crying; it was so powerful.”
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