He walked into the press room preceded by his handlers (some robed, some suited) almost exactly 30 minutes late. But you can't fault someone for making journalists wait, especially someone who could take as his motto Herbert von Karajan's exasperated comment once to a Berlin taxi driver: "I'm wanted everywhere!"
Representatives from newspapers and television stations took turns asking questions. The reporter from the Miami Herald asked what he did in his spare time in South Florida. He said he followed his normal routine of reading and meditating. (Did the reporter expect him to say, "clubbing"?) A more pointed question was the old attack on pacifism: How can non-violence work when dealing with terrorists? He talked about the importance of education.
When he finally appeared on stage, a sold-out crowd stood and applauded. He sat cross-legged in an armchair, in his scarlet and yellow robe, and spoke about compassion. Answering questions, he sometimes gave the impression that the job of being an oracle was getting a bit tiresome. But his famous playfulness came through, as when he made fun of our president's ears.
Filing out of the hall, the crowd appeared as a mix of young and old, students and retired people. The latter were less bedizened than the usual condo crowd, and could almost (but not quite) have come from Portland. One young man said, after what was obviously his first exposure to His Holiness, "He was a lot more down-to-earth than I had imagined him." Another said: "He was funny though. He was like a funny old uncle."
For me the most interesting aspect of the day was not so much what he said - stressing the importance of compassion, selflessness, inner beauty - but that he said it in South Florida. (It was as audacious as Pope John Paul II preaching about human dignity in communist Poland.) And thousands of people listened approvingly.
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