Correspondents: Covering a Pilgrimage

Paris Match, the French picture magazine, chartered a Caravelle jet to fly 55 staffers and a photo processing lab to the Holy Land. RAI, Italy's government-owned broadcasting system, borrowed an L.S.T. from the Italian Navy, debarked 35 vehicles and 245 men. Tiny Lebanon managed to deploy a journalistic force of 60. Even Tass, the Russian news service, and the big Moscow dailies, Pravda and Izvestia, put correspondents on the scene. All told, some 1,200 newsmen from 34 countries converged on the first papal visit to the Holy Land. Inevitably, the press and its photographers made much of the news themselves.

Never before has a Pope been subjected to such literally bruising personal contact with the press. But only once did Paul VI show annoyance at the ceaseless importunities of the newsmen. In Capernaum, where he knelt to pray in the ruins of a synagogue where Christ himself is said to have preached, Paul drew back in dismay when a radio newscaster thrust a microphone directly under the papal chin.

Papa, Benedizione. Paul's tolerance was repeatedly put to the test, and everywhere it was difficult to tell which was more important, the Pope or the pop of a flashbulb. A swarm of 150 reporters and photographers crashed one of the Pope's private meetings with Patriarch Athenagoras I, scuffled boisterously for position while the two religious leaders stared in surprise. Outside the walled Garden of Gethsemane, police had to pull prying newsmen from ladders. One freelance U.S. photographer managed to sneak an automatic, motor-driven camera into the tomb in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Paul had gone to pray.

At Galilee, photographers waded knee-deep into the water to snap the Pope head on. As Paul climbed back up the old stone steps leading from the shore, his path was blocked by a genuflecting Italian lensman. "Papa, benedizione [Your benediction, Pope]," implored the photographer. Paul complied —giving the waylayer just the picture he had been after.

A Christian? Authorities in Jordan and Israel had made press arrangements that, on paper at least, complemented the papal tolerance. Press censorship was temporarily lifted, and passage across the border separating the two bitter enemies was made easy for newsmen. The only correspondent to encounter any serious trouble at the checkpoint was the New York Times's Milton Bracker, who, on entering Jordan, gave the wrong answer to a routine question: "Are you a Christian?" "No," replied Bracker. "I am a Jew." Authorities begged him to retract his response, if only for their records. When the defiant Bracker refused, they admitted him to Jordan anyway.

Official forbearance eventually gave way under the pressure of the press. Jordanian troops escorting what was soon dubbed "the papalcade" eventually resorted to muscle, swagger sticks and gun butts to keep order in the unholy mess. Cesidio Lolli, sedate papal diarist for L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican daily, lost his temper after a manhandling by Arab Legionnaires. "You may be the soldiers of Herod," he snapped, "but please remember that I am not a Christian infant."