Cheers for El Torero

Last weekend Pope John Paul II exhorted Spain to remain true to its Christian roots. The BBC?s Rome correspondent gives his impressions of the visit

AMONG the ?Welcome to Madrid? banners decorating the streets around the Plaza Col?n in the Spanish capital, centrepiece of the Pope?s visit, was a description of John Paul that I have never seen in any other country during his worldwide peregrinations. One banner called him simply ?El Torero? ? the bullfighter For a Spaniard to call someone a torero is the highest compliment possible. I saw the point. Perhaps it is not such a bad description of the fourth-longest reigning Pope in history, a proven fighter for his faith whose staying power and consistency are truly remarkable.

Karol Wojtyla kept his sights very sharply focused during this fifth visit to Spain as Pope. The Vatican claims that just over 94 per cent of Spaniards are baptised into the Catholic Church. But according to Spain?s State Centre for Sociological Research, the percentage of people who actually say they are Catholic fell to 80 per cent in 2002, and Sunday Mass attendance fell from 23 per cent in 1998 to 18 per cent last year.

Obviously the Pope will have had in mind these alarming reports about the rapid secularisation of one of the greatest Catholic countries in Europe. After a rest and a short meeting with Prime Minister Aznar, he went straight to an air force base 30 kilometres from the city centre to address about 500,000 young Catholics from all over Spain.

From this vast concourse he received a welcome reserved in most countries only for pop stars. Conscious that their Prime Minister had publicly sided with George W. Bush over the war in Iraq, basically ignoring public opinion and the advice given to him by the Pope at a Vatican audience shortly before the attack on Baghdad, they erupted into applause and cheering every time the Pope mentioned the word peace. A contingent of soldiers repeatedly threw their hats into the air.

Sitting on a white throne and speaking in firmer tones than I have heard from him for years, the Pope spelled out his vision for the new ?Europe of the spirit?. He described it as ?not closed within itself but open to dialogue and collaboration with all peoples?. So, he said, ?it is a Europe conscious of being called upon to act as a lighthouse of civilisation ... determined to unite its efforts and its creativity in the service of peace and solidarity?.

?Ideas?, the old torero thundered, ?should not be imposed, but proposed!?

The applause was deafening. He was clearly enjoying himself. The strong evening sunlight cast deep shadows but the crowd wanted more, and the Pope, invigorated by the contact with young people, went on until darkness had fallen.

?I am a young man of 83?, he ad-libbed, and then went on to recall that 56 years had passed since he was ordained a priest and it had all been immensely worthwhile. He was the role model and the audience responded with great feeling. I asked a girl called Carmen who had travelled to see him from Valladolid on the plains of Castile why this old man was so attractive to young people who usually demand their pop idols to be as young as they are.

?But you don?t understand, he is as young as we are, even younger!?, she exclaimed.

The next morning, bright and early, even bigger crowds of madrile?os made their way by bus, taxi, car and metro to a central plaza decked out with an altar. They filled all four boulevards leading into the plaza. From above they formed a vast human cross and were able to see the Pope in close-up on giant television screens. Black and white portraits of the ?stars? of this occasion, the five new saints, two priests and three nuns, gazed down from a giant 30-metre-high hoarding attached to the side of an office block. The style of the poster imitated the giant advertisements for Hollywood films covering other office blocks in the area. Indeed, at first glance I mistook the five portraits and the motto underneath for a film promotion.

To his adult audience the Pope?s message was even more direct and clear: families should stay united, and the Spanish people should not abandon their Christian roots.

The tell-tale signs of a new consumer society with high economic expectations were all around me: chic shops and restaurants, well-heeled bourgeois families milling around in the hotel which served as press centre. It was all a far cry from the Spain I first got to know as a student during the winter of 1950 and the spring of 1951 when memories of the horrors of the civil war were still etched into the fa?ades of damaged buildings in many cities, and the concrete jungle of the Costa del Sol was still to be created.

Although one of the new saints was executed by the Republicans at the start of the civil war in 1936, the Spanish Church and the Pope were in total agreement that these canonisations in 2003 should not serve as an excuse for a revival of past hatreds. Saint Pedro P?veda was presented as a benefactor of the poor and as an educator, not as a martyr of the Communists. The ghosts of the civil war seem finally to have been laid to rest just as completely as all physical evidence of the bombardments has now been erased.

Spain, just like Italy, has undergone a huge social and economic metamorphosis in the past half-century, transforming itself from a pre-industrial age into ? as King Juan Carlos told the Pope in his speech of welcome ? ?a dynamic and modern society?. It is only natural that the Catholic Church in Spain should be reeling from the effects of this revolution, which has been accelerating even since John Paul?s first visit to Spain way back in 1982.

I remember during that tour attending the Pope?s meeting with 3,000 Spanish Carmelite nuns in Avila at the house of their foundress, St Teresa. Some of the sisters had emerged from their cloisters for the first time in 20 years to see the Pope. Nuns in the front row clutched brand-new Japanese tape recorders to capture the occasion for playback in the solitude of their cells. The Pope shot out an admonitory finger. ?I see the consumer society has arrived even here?, he quipped, not entirely in jest.

Although some 800 Basque priests sent a petition to the Pope on his arrival to support their separatist cause, the Pope was having nothing of it. He refused the bait and referred in public only to the dangers of violence due to what he tactfully called ?exasperated nationalism?. But he cannot have failed to observe from the window of his plane ? both as he arrived and took off ? the fully armed, black-hooded police sharpshooters standing on the roof of a truck shadowing the papal flight until the moment it left the tarmac.

The Pope in 36 hours focused almost exclusively on the future of his Church in Spain, not on the scourge of Basque terrorism, nor the immediate political future of the country (there are elections coming up).

This was not a papal trip in the style of the memorable trans-continental tours of the past 25 years, but a pared-down version. The five short trips planned for this year are suitable for a man who should properly be in a wheelchair, but manages to get around in a dignified way in public by being pushed along on a low-tech trolley with a rail he can hang on to, or sitting on a high-tech adjustable throne which rises up and down at the touch of a button. Next month comes the centenary tour to Croatia, and then ? who knows ? perhaps to Russia in August. But that is another story.