I was not even a tiny speck in the wave of people that went to Philadelphia to see Pope Francis on his only visit to the United States. It was September 2015 and nearly 18,000 people had registered for the Catholic Church’s World Meeting of Families even before it was known that the pontiff would be there.
With that announcement, an extra million or so people — no exaggeration — crowded the beltway and route on which the Popemobile would travel. They jockeyed politely to be near at least the big screen TV if not the pope himself as he addressed the crowd that final Sunday morning.
Small and unseen as I was, I didn’t feel that way. As Deseret News photographer Laura Seitz and I sat with a family that arrived dozens of hours early to secure a place from which to see the pope pass, the love and passion, the actual exuberance of the crowd washed both over me and through me. In my entire life, I’d never felt such a spirit of unity.
Sister Faustina Ferko, a nun from Chicago, summed up the sense of the crowd: Pope Francis’ visit “is God revealing his love for me even though I will be in a crowd of 1.5 million,” she said.
Families had come from all over not just America, but nearby countries. Eldon and Christine Matte drove more than 3,000 miles from British Columbia then squished a little tighter with their six kids and invited us to join them at the fence.
I will never forget what that front-row seat afforded me, in addition to its lesson in selflessness, kindness and even sacrifice on the part of the Mattes, as they’d waited so long to secure that precious bit of turf.
On that trip, Pope Francis called family a “factory of hope.” And hope was nowhere more apparent than in the faces of parents who held up small children. State troopers who separated the crowd from the Popemobile were caught up in the spirit, too, reaching out for the babies, then offering them to the pope.
I was standing near Viviana Barreto, an Argentine native who lived in New Jersey and desperately hoped the pope would kiss Tiago, who was a year old. Every time she saw him on the big screen kissing a baby, her hand fluttered to her heart. A trooper noticed, too, and I saw him pantomime, “I can try,” as he reached for Tiago.
When the pope was opposite them, though, he was facing the other way and caressed the face of another child, whose mother beamed.
That woman’s joy made it impossible for Barreto to be disappointed.
“Parents just want the world for their children, don’t they?” a woman near me commented. “We want it all, for them.”
Eldon Matte told me they’d focused their trip on three things that Pope Francis emphasized since his papacy began in 2013: May I? Thank you. And pardon. They are keys, Matte said, to strong families and even societies.
“Family life is messy. God works within that,” he added.
The other memory that lingers a decade after I saw the pope in Philadelphia, is the Knotted Grotto, an “art installation” on the grounds of the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul.
Thousands of people wrote their prayers on strips of paper, then tied them to the yurt-like structure. Many of them were written in languages I couldn’t read, prayers and loving missives from all over the world, hand-delivered by people filled with both faith and hope. I knew, standing in its shelter, with little paper streamers everywhere, that it was a holy place.
After you tied your own prayer or intention to the structure, you picked someone else’s, said a prayer and unknotted it then moved it to the other side. The concept honored Pope Francis’ image of Jesus’ mother as “Mary, undoer of knots.”
A volunteer explained that it’s sometimes almost impossible to undo your own knots. You need someone else — sometimes many other someones — to untie your knots, pray for you and help you occupy a better space.
The pope didn’t feel well one night and instead of a leisurely cruise past, the Popemobile sped along the path. But still, the pope stopped at the grotto to bless the prayers and the people who made them.
I am not Catholic. But today I know the world has lost someone who cared deeply for others, giving and receiving love abundantly. I saw it — and more than that, felt it — in Philadelphia.