BY MARY REINHOLZ | Pope Francis, known for his devotion to the poor and marginalized, could find plenty of people fitting that description in the rapidly gentrifying East Village — if, that is, his motorcade had been scheduled to pass by places like the shuttered Church of the Nativity, at 44 Second Ave., when he arrives in New York City Thurs., Sept. 24, for a whirlwind visit to Manhattan.
There, a couple of homeless men in their 30s huddled against the church door on a recent Sunday morning. One of them identified himself as Jon Bivona and claimed to be a rock musician who just had his $2,000 guitar stolen from him by thieves in the night. He sleeps under plastic sheeting propped up by an umbrella, and talked about encounters with junkies and gang members from the Crips and the Bloods.
Emerging from his improvised tent around 9 a.m., he also railed against the Archdiocese of New York, which is coordinating the papal schedule in New York. The Secret Service is coordinating all the security with some 50 government agencies, including the New York Police Department, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.
Cops of all stripes will be swarming through the city when his holiness shows up with his own papal entourage for a visit that will include his addressing the U.N. General Assembly Friday morning. Numerous other world leaders will be there, including President Obama, creating the prospect of a traffic nightmare and a major challenge for police.
“The cops are the least of my problems,” said Bivona, who seemed to be more concerned about keeping Nativity safe from developers, predicting without substantiation that the archdiocese “will turn this church into multimillion-dollar condos for a bunch of hedge-fund managers. These are the kinds of people coming into the neighborhood. They don’t even know who The Ramones are. It’s disgraceful!”
Bivona made it plain he would not be heading uptown to catch a glimpse of Francis arriving for Vespers at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Thursday evening. And he’d need a ticket from a city lottery to join the tens of thousands of people expected to jam West Drive in Central Park to see the Jesuit pontiff in his popemobile in a processional after he leaves Our Lady Queens of Angels school in East Harlem Friday afternoon.
As Bivona ranted, several Latina women stood nearby reciting the Rosary outside Nativity, which closed Aug. 1 when its parish merged with that of Most Holy Redeemer, at 173 E. Third St., during a massive realignment of churches within the archdiocese. Would they show up at the 9/11 memorial where Francis, the first Latin American pope, would lead an interfaith prayer service at 11:30 a.m. Friday morning? How about when he arrives at Madison Square Garden Friday evening to celebrate Mass in a throne-like chair?
“No, I’m not going — there will be too many people,” said Mirayes Tores, 65, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. She leaned on a cane and said she was praying for Nativity to reopen.
Her comely 41-year-old daughter, Noeimi, who described herself as a “first-generation American” living on the Lower East Side, said she would be looking after her two children, ages 3 and 5, who sat beside her in a stroller, when the pope arrived in town.
Others in the East Village were more enthusiastic about his visit, among them Martha Hennessy, a granddaughter of Dorothy Day, the late co-founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker movement and a candidate for sainthood. Hennessy, who lives on a Vermont farm but stays at the Catholic Worker’s Maryhouse when she’s in New York, acts as one of the volunteers for the needy who come by the residence, at 55 E. Third St., for food, clothing and showers.
Asked about her feelings about Francis’s visit, Hennessy said, “I’m excited and rejuvenated,” noting she had obtained tickets to attend Francis’s Mass at The Garden from the Dorothy Day Guild, a group seeking to advance the cause of her grandmother’s canonization. The group operates out of the archdiocese’s offices at 1011 First Ave. Dorothy Day, who advocated for the poor through nonviolent “acts of mercy,” already has been accorded the title “servant of god,” by the Catholic Church, a preliminary step on the road to sainthood.
Hennessy was scheduled to speak Sat., Sept. 19, at the new Sheen Center in Noho about the parallels between Day and the pontiff. In a phone conversation, Hennessy said that Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglia, had “suffered” in his own way during the “dirty war” in his native Argentina in 1976, when priests, including Jesuits, were among those imprisoned and tortured by the last military dictatorship in that country.
Since his election as pope in 2013, Francis, once head of the Jesuits in Argentina, has been haunted by accusations from journalists that he failed to help two Jesuit priests who were abducted by the military, because of their activism in the Buenos Aires slums, charges the Vatican has strongly denied. Francis has said he helped to hide people during that repressive era.
For her part, Hennessy believes Francis has “much to offer” Catholics in New York. But she noted many of them and members of other faiths won’t be able to attend his Mass at The Garden, which has a seating capacity of about 20,000, “because of the security issues and the logistics. I’m disappointed we don’t have a bigger venue.”
She noted that multitudes of pilgrims came to Francis’s 2013 Mass held outdoors at the Copacabana beach in Brazil — a reported 3 million — many splashing in the surf. In 2008, Benedict XVI, Francis’s now-retired predecessor, celebrated Mass at the old Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, drawing 60,000. It was the third papal Mass at the stadium.
Joseph Zwilling, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of New York, said the Vatican “planners” had asked that all papal events be held in Manhattan so that the pope could spend “more time with people and less time traveling around.” Zwilling also noted that the main focus of the pope’s first U.S. visit would be on the weekend events in Philadelphia, where the Vatican wanted to have a “major outdoor Mass. We were asked to keep our Mass on a smaller scale.”
Neither Zwilling nor a spokesperson for Mayor de Blasio could provide estimates of the costs of the pope’s visit to the archdiocese or to the city “at this time.”
Most parishes held drawings for the relatively small number of tickets that the archdiocese distributed for the M.S.G. event, sources said.
Most Holy Redeemer parish received only nine, said its pastor, the Right Reverend Sean McGillicuddy, while he was greeting worshipers leaving a 9 a.m. Sunday Mass.
“We picked names out of a box,” he explained. McGillicuddy will hear confessions when the pope arrives for Vespers at St. Patrick’s, a prayer service open only to clergy, all chosen by lottery. He expects the experience to be “uplifting.”
Mercedes Sanchez, a 32-year-old former congregant at Nativity who now attends Most Holy Redeemer, won a ticket to Francis’s M.S.G. Mass, even though she didn’t enter her name in the lottery. Her cousin, Cristina Tejada, 36, did that when Sanchez was attending a friend’s wedding and called her when she won in the live church drawing Sept. 8.
Sanchez, a leader of a group of Catholics that unsuccessfully sought to keep Nativity open, said she was “astonished” at getting so lucky.
“I don’t know if it’s divine intervention or what, but I am in awe at how three people who played a role in the efforts to keep Nativity open won tickets to see Pope Francis,” she wrote in an e-mail.
If she had a chance to speak to Francis, Sanchez said, “I would ask him what he planned to do with closed Catholic churches. I would ask him if he will consider reopening some of them. And if not, would he turn some of those buildings into homes or centers for the homeless?”
Sanchez said other former Nativity members will be seeing Pope Francis at his Central Park procession, noting they signed up for the city’s lottery online.
Her cousin, Cristina Tejada, who also is a former Nativity parishioner now attending Most Holy Redeemer, stood in line to put her name in the lottery, as well, but wasn’t selected.
“I wasn’t disappointed,” she said. “Things happen for a reason.”
She’s prepared to spend up to $5,000 to see Francis when he visits Poland next year.
“I want to travel to Poland because he’s a lovely person,” she said. “He’s head of the Church and a person who is an example of the Christian life.”
Reverend Monsignor Kevin Nelan, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church, at 414 E. 14th St., said 22 parishioners would be going to The Garden to see Francis celebrate Mass.
“And I have a ticket to St. Patrick’s,” he added.
Nelan has been present at three other papal visits to New York. The first was in 1965 when he was a mere lad of 14, and traveled by subway from his family’s home in the Bronx to see Pope John Paul VI, the first pontiff to visit the Americas, being driven in a limousine through Central Park en route to Yankee Stadium.
There was no popemobile then, he recalled.
“And no tickets,” he said. “It was so much different than it is today. There was no security like there is now. No one thought about terrorism.”
Those attending The Garden event will have to report there at 2 p.m. because of security concerns, and wait at least four hours before the pope celebrates Mass, according to news reports. To keep things moving along, the archdiocese has arranged for a two-hour show starting at 3 p.m., featuring celebrity performers, like Harry Connick, Jr., Gloria Estefan, Jennifer Hudson and James “D Train” Williams. They will perform in a devotional program called “A Journey of Faith.” Unremarkably, there will be religious merchandise for sale.
The lavish event seems to run counter to the pope’s preference for a humble style. But it is in keeping with the Church’s much-noted skill for providing dramatic forms of worship over the centuries, among them the traditional Latin Masses with incense and the tinkling of bells. Those Masses dwindled significantly after the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, observed Jane Sammon, a longtime volunteer at Maryhouse who knew Dorothy Day up until her death there in 1980 at age 83.
“Smells and bells are what used to run things,” Sammon said. “People used to say it was a theatrical church. Not so much anymore.”
