As I look forward to Pentecost with a few thousand of my closest friends in St Peter’s Square, I can’t help but remember my first experience of a crowd in Rome.
Pentecost 1998: I’m leading my wife and six-year-old daughter into the masses and who do we run into but the adult leader who was escorting my 13-year-old son and his youth team on the pilgrimage. We asked how things were going and he said everything was fine, except somehow he had lost track of my son and one of his buddies.
There were somewhere in St. Peter’s Square, as were more than half a million other folks…he just didn’t know precisely (or even generally) where the two boys might be. However, he assured us that they knew the way back to the seminary where they were staying and we shouldn’t worry.
If you are a parent reading this, you know that the admonition not to worry was less than consoling. But we acted like typical, mature parents. My wife prayed. My daughter asked if her brother was going to be OK. I starting looking for a good place in the crowd to stand, convinced that there really wasn’t a way to retrieve a lost teenager in a crowd of rapid Catholics.
We kept walking, down a side street near the square. My wife was through several prayers by this point and, of course, we see our son traipsing down the cobblestones, heading right for us. He smiled and shook his head as we explained to him that he was lost and we were worried sick.
He explained that he and his buddy weren’t lost, but the rest of his team might be. Then the two of then plunged into the crowd, determined to get a good look at the Pope.
Later, we learned that they wormed their way to the barrier the Popemobile would pass and got close enough that they almost could reach out and touch the Holy Father. I guess they weren’t lost.
